HATER'S DOZEN Local H's latest

Local H's Scott Lucas gets good when things are going nowhere; he's made failure his métier. His one universally acknowledged hit was called "Bound for the Floor." After dragging the word copasetic up and down rock radio playlists back in 1996, the frustrated underachievers about which Lucas sang set their sights on settling for less. And life imitated art, or prophecies fulfilled themselves. The group's best album—1998's Pack Up the Cats, a concept piece about a small-town act that fucks up its big break—got waylaid when their label restructured. The two-man band then saw half its line-up turnover. Its excellent treatise on has-beens, 2004's Whatever Happened to P.J. Soles?, may already be out-of-print.

Break out the bulletproof bulbs: Twelve Angry Months (Shout Factory, May 13) is Lucas' long-term relationship record. It skips right past the silly love songs, forsakes matrimony for acrimony, forgoes hand-holding for the finger. It starts at the end and stays there.

Not that it ever sits still.

The tunes have a great pop sensibility and hooks you can hang meat on, but sometimes there's so much momentum you forget to notice the niceties. (Drummer Brian St. Clair is a monster.) Each of the 12 tracks covers a calendar page. The sendoff's a spaghetti Western-style standoff, a custody battle over a record collection. It gets petty pretty quick, heads start banging. Blink and you've rocked straight through to March, where you're staring down-nose at your ex's new upscale guy ("BMW Man"). The odd ballad ("Summer of Boats") or alt-country nod ("Simple Pleas") allows you to collect your thoughts. If there's an overall weakness, it's that too many tracks have climaxes demanded of them.

The first single is "24 Hour Break-Up Session," a serviceable "Don't Fear the Reaper"-"Teen Spirit" hybrid, but the real gem is "Michelle (Again)." Bouncing around like an oomphed-out Rick Springfield ditty, it explains away third-party break-up assumptions with brilliant stuff like: "She got what I don't want / What I don't what is always what I got."

One of Lucas' strong suits is his refusal to couch inarticulate feelings in clever turns of phrase.

There are opaque specifics that prevent Months from congealing into an actual story, but it's unimportant how literally a listener buys into a linear narrative. (A whole year? Really?) More interesting is the lack of a smooth emotional arc. Feelings turn back on themselves, offering more than the dozen flavors of anger advertised. Its meanest bald sentiment, "I hope you have a lonely life," is quickly checked by a helpless "You're allowed to change." Misogynist put-downs ("You're just a groupie ... and to think I used to fuck you") are coupled with hairshirt self-pity ("...but only a groupie would ever want to love me").

It's a mature work, honest about its juvenile feelings, conflicted and unironically self-aware. December seems to offer some wisdom, positing love as an impossible numbers game, begging appreciation for whatever few moments of actual interpersonal connection can be managed. Another one of Lucas' losers, at least this one loved before he lost.

Whatever that's worth. Because Decembers roll right on into Januarys, and the album's last track bleeds right back into its first.