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Grace Potter & The Nocturnals: The Lion The Beast The Beat

Hollywood

Listening to the four studio albums that Grace Potter & The Nocturnals have made since 2005, you’d think that four different bands were behind them and, in a sense, that’s true. When rhythm guitarist Benny Yurco and bassist Cat Popper joined the fold in 2009, GPN moved away from the earthy rock ‘n’ soul amalgam that had been their trademark and into something funky, heavy and hard. Whether Popper’s split from the band late last year is what sparked yet another reboot is anybody’s guess, but this much is certain: Grace has suddenly gone glam.

The Lion The Beast The Beat opens with the title track— huge, pounding drums and a tribal chant that conjures up The Cranberries circa 1996. Potter even sounds like Dolores O’Riordan for the first part of the song until it shifts gears, exploding into a countrified, guitar-driven, dance-pop-onsteroids anthem that’s still firmly rooted in the ‘90s. It’s one thing for Faith Hill to opt into Nashville’s overblown facsimile of glam rock, but Grace Potter? What’s going on here?

Potter isn’t a shrinking violet when it comes to asserting her musical vision, and though she was never at ease with the soulful hippy siren of 2005’s Nothing but the Water, at least it was an identity; now, it feels like she’s fighting to find one. She might be a Zep-worthy rock diva (“The Divide”), a slyly self-aware pop star (“Keepsake”), a country singer at her core (“Parachute Heart”) or a combination of all three—we just don’t know yet.

And then again, do we have to? She’s still got one powerful set of lungs and a pitch-perfect voice that can carry a moody song like “Runaway,” with its new-wave-throwback angst, into pure goose bump territory. “Loneliest Soul,” the one song on the album produced by the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach (he co-wrote three more, including the catchy bubblegum single “Never Go Back”), throbs with a sassy grit that showcases Potter at her restless best: “I need something/ But can’t give nothing/ My heart’s pumping/ I can’t leave it alone.”

And that’s the maddening dilemma of The Lion The Beast The Beat. As weighed down as it is by heavy-handed pop clichés and layers of sonic bombast—unusual considering producer Jim Scott’s light touch on 2009’s Wilco (The Album) — it still serves up tantalizing hints of an immensely gifted singer/songwriter. If only those fleeting glimpses were enough.