Writing music can be a challenge. Sometimes figuring how to join one section to another can feel like digging through a giant tub of Legos to find the perfect rare piece. However, it rarely feels like the WORK of writing lyrics. 

 

More than any other single element of music, lyrics determine a song’s individuality. Just as no chess game is the same as any other after 30-some moves, no song is the same as any other after a line or two. Chord progressions, drum patterns, dynamics, effects: these are Legos in service of lyrics. You plug them onto each other to construct your “all-original” song. Yet, make no mistake, when when a listener remembers a song, it’s a chunk of lyrics that their brain will latch onto. 

 

But what if you’re too tired or drunk or high or sick or lazy to write lyrics? What if cracking your head open to find something original to say (or find an original way to say soemthing unoriginal) seems like too much work? What if you got into music to look cool and play with your friends? Writing, after all, is for lonely nerds. What if you want to eat dessert for dinner? 

 

This week’s Heck Records are “Dessert Albums,” records where lyrics take a backseat to jamming, grooving, pressing buttons on effects pedals and synthesizers, screaming nonsense, noodling guitar solos, beating riffs into the ground, and repeating the same thing over and over and over again. This is not to say that they are 100% lyric free – what is this, jazz? – but that the lyrics on hand are more a textural element than the main show. If a record’s lyrics can be replaced with similar sounding vocalizations and still work, it might be on this list. And for the record, yes, these albums all slay. 

 

The Grateful Dead’s 1969 LIVE/DEAD finds the enduring jam band at their acid-brained Haight-Ashbury height before they evolved into a cosmic boogie band. Diehards may prefer other iterations (1972, 1977), but this my favorite. Throughout, the band is a fire-breathing organism, ripping through these tracks with an energy that may surprise critics who see them only as flabby jammers. Their takes of “St. Stephen” and “The Eleven” are definitive and torrid. And though things get a little too sweaty with Pigpen’s 15-minute “Turn On Your Lovelight” blues workout, and they end on an appropriately bleak note with Reverend Gary Davis’s “Death Don’t Have No Mercy.” For a band who’re caricatured as sunny hippie freaks, the Dead spent a lot of their catalog dwelling on the Long Sleep. As far as lyrics…consider Live/Dead’s monumentous “Dark Star”: 23-minutes, ten lines. 

Iggy Pop is one of my favorite rock & roll personalities, and that’s in no small part to the stupid brilliance of his lyrics. “No fun / my babe / no fun.” Has boredom ever been described so succinctly? (It’s only when he tries getting cleverly stupid that he faulters: “My dick is turning into a tree.” Ew, no, Ig.) Nowhere is his genius concision more apparent than on The Stooges’ 1970 album FUN HOUSE. The album, a corner post of punk rock, grooves and pummels in equal measure. “Down on the Street” struts, “TV Eye” fucks, and “L.A. Blues” totally collapses under the weight of everything that preceeds it, with Steve MacKay’s saxaphone honking into oblivion. Pop’s lyrics rarely stretch between four or five words a line, and his grunts, groans, and exhultations are just as informative as anything he actually articulates. Truthfully, though, what needs to be said? He’s bored. He’s horny. He’s fucked up. Loooooooooord!

While Fun House ramps up to the chaos, Comets on Fire’s 2004 album BLUE CATHEDRAL throws you in from the jump. Most of the album galumphs relentlessly forward, spilling drum fills, guitar peals and globs of distortion in its wake. Delay is used so frequently that one of the band’s members, the fake-sounding Noel von Harmonson, is credited as playing “electronics and echoplex,” the vintage tape delay unit. But within the malestrom of sound, and unlike on Fun House, Blue Cathedral finds moments of psychedelic tranquilty. What you won’t find, however, are lyrics that make any sense at all. In fact, although human voices do appear on the record, I couldn’t tell you the language they’re speaking, let alone what they’re saying. 

The Flaming Lips became so successful after the release of the poppy turn-of-the-millenium albums The Soft Bulletin and Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots that singer Wayne Coyle could climb into a giant hamster ball and surf atop the band’s audience at their crowded festival shows. By 2009, the band could’ve coasted on their songbook for the next 20 years, but instead they released the bizzare double EMBRYONIC. During its release, Coyle told Pitchfork that the band had intended to make ten normal songs and ten of what he called “freakouts,” but that they had so much fun jamming the freakouts that they made the entire album out of them. Embryonic is full of cool sounds, haunting dynamics, and off-kilter grooves. It’s also much lighter on the blah-blah-blah than their previous three albums. Bless them. The world needed “Ego’s Last Stand” and “Convinced of the Hex” more than another xerox of “Do You Realize??”

Does a band need songwriting as long as they stop playing at the same time? The Birds of Maya, a grungy project from Purling Hiss’s Mike Polizze, seems to exist to answer that question. On their 2021 album VALDEZ, BoM sound like an even more blown out version of Rust Never Sleeps Neil Young (who easily could’ve made this list) or a somewhat more well-adjusted Melvins. Valdez gives us guitars upon guitars, neat stop-starts, and a caveman rhythm section that makes Crazy Horse seem like the MGs. Although there are lyrics, they sound more like shouted vowels than actual words. It’s paradoxical, but in rock and roll, sometimes articulation makes a song’s message more muddled. Rawgh onnn!