Leaving Trains
"You shoulda killed me when you had the chance," he sings, and 17 years in, Falling James is still at it - wearing the lipstick and panties, the faux drag queen with the voice of a teenboy punk and the five o'clock shadow at noon, the former rock critic who decided to do his damage from the other side of the guitar. Even as Exene reinvents herself once more as Auntie Christ, cutting soundtrack sides for Demi Moore movies; as John Doe does his taking folkie blues thing on the Ash Grove stage; as the Descendents gow up and take 30 steps back to the Mr. Coffee; and as Social D. and the Offspring and myriad other young Southern Califronia punks do their Rodney Bingenheimer two-steps across the major-label stage, Leaving Trains continues to make its racket unchanged and unscathed after 11 years on SST and a lifetime as a heroic obscurity (the band doesn't even warrant a mention in Barney Hoskyns's "completist" Waiting for the Sun L.A. musical history).

There's something rather charming about picking up a molding copy of BAM from June 1989 - back when the rag was thick with two-page spreads advertising the likes of Rings of Saturn at the Whisky and sundry other anonymous and forgotten hair-today-gone-tomorrow bands that used to fake up the L.A. rock scene - and stumbling across a back-of-the-book dispatch from the front lines in which Falling James remembers the good old days when he went from being "sarcastic and responsible to just being an asshole." There's something rather comforting in knowing that for every 10 bands out there making comebacks by sounding like they never left and never learned, there's still a band like Leaving Trains - which doesn't necessarily get better, but only because there's no place to go from up (especially when you consider the debut, the Dave Roback-produced Well Down Blue Highway, which now exists as a long-lost early-indie gem).

Indeed, the band's just-out-this-week Smoke Follows Beauty - yet another showcase for James and his ever-rotating cast of characters, including, this go-round, guitarist-vocalist Melanie Vammen (ex of the Muffs and Pandoras) and drummer Allen Clark (from Lazy Cowgirls) - is an 18-song, 43-minute blitz filled with anthems to dope smoking ("Smoke a Fatty," "Marijuana"), bars dedicated to the contradictory pursuit of getting drunk while watching athletes in action ("Bash in Your Face"), and erstwhile dreams of rock and roll stardom ("Big Star," a 48-second epic). The title song is an unexpected country-rock rave-up Dave Alvin would be smart to claim, and too bad "Dreams Overboard" bogs things down with its sluggish pacing - right in the middle of the CD too, damn - but Smoke is a right good kick made by a man who still has a blast making loud, fast music no matter who heeds his cries for help. And in the end, Leaving Trains exists as proof that not all of SST's good bands jumped ship or sued the label's ass into the ground. (R.W.)