Some Days You Get the Thunder, Some Days the Thunder Gets You

The Fullthrottlelazy Podcast Episode #3

2012-02-27T00:57:00.002Z

Discussion topics this week include: bands named after cereal and diseases, the cultural significance of football chants, Russian literature and we declare war on steampunk. With Cock Sparrer, Kriegshög, Ambition Mission and more.

DOWNLOAD FULLTHROTTLE LAZY EPISODE 3

Tracklisting after the break.

Motörhead - Black Leather Jacket
-
Oblivion - Ellen McCarthy
Margaret Thrasher - Fuck Your Face
Amebix - Gods of the Grain
-
Copyrights - Grown Folks Business
Armitage Shanks - Ambulance
Thug Murder - Brand New, I Feel
Apocalypse Hoboken - I’m at Least Eight Things
-
OBN IIIs - New Innocence
Great Cynics - Not Saying Sorry
Гражданская Оборона - Суицид
-
Hickey - Hickey is About Long Hair and Getting High
Ambition Mission - La La La
The Hold Steady - Swish
-
Pagans - What’s This Shit Called Love?
Flipper - Ha Ha Ha
Cock Sparrer - Take ‘Em All
-
Kriegshög - Burn

The Fullthrottlelazy Podcast Episode #2

2012-02-20T07:29:00.002Z

One hour of punk rock interspersed with incompetence and mutually antagonistic conversation about the Berlin wall, Motorhead, Kreayshawn's relationship to punk rock, awkward interactions with members of bands and other fun things to make the brain grow. Tracklisting after the break.

PODCAST EPISODE TWO

Wonk Unit - Guts
-
Stun Guns - Sensurround
Snuggle - Just Another Party
Supersuckers - Fisticuffs
-
Blitzkid - Nosferatu
High Tension Wires - Hallowed Ground
Crude - Human Feelings
Mojo Nixon - Let's Go Burn Ol' Nashville Down
-
KARP - Get No Toys (When You Pay the Money)
Vacation Bible School - Song to Kill Yourself To
The Trashwomen - I'm Dangerous
-
Dead to Me - Ran That Scam
Tragatelo - Tragatelo
Toy Dolls - Sod the Neighbours
-
The Orphans - The Government Stole My Germs CD
Fight Like Apes - Lend Me Your Face
Mach Pelican - Born to Delivery
-
Big Boys - We Got Your Money

So Scratched Into Our Souls #11: The Queers - Fuck the World (I'm Hanging Out With You)

2012-02-17T16:50:00.001Z

"Anyway, while record collector scum fail to understand that the point of accumulating info is to marshal it into an argument, they have their uses as trivia merchants who can be consulted by those who know that facts alone are useless things. There is a huge difference between playing DUMB and being genuinely STOOPID. This explains why I rate the Queers and loathe lumpen-intellectual Britpop wannabes like Blur and Oasis." - Stewart Home, Cranked Up Really High: Genre Theory and Punk Rock

The Queers are a dumb band. Deliberately so. Because pull it all down, and pop music, punk music, pretty much any music that relies more on verve, heart and snappiness over technical virtuosity relies on, is the raw fuckwitted immediacy of adolescent emotion. And that is some fully dumb shit.

And that's why they wrote the greatest love song of all time in Fuck the World (I'm Hanging Out With You Tonight). Because love is dumb, a beautiful relentless assault on the intellect, a rabbit-punch to Rodin's thinker. It is a well well worn approach to describe it as something which stuns, stupefies, befuddles, discombobulates and turns over the place like a bored puppy. Though this doesn't really say much, because love, in all its snowflake simplicity, is kind of a well-mined subject, a Diavik-hole, dead-earth chasm of artistic and emotional pursuit, twatted-out by every single person who's ever penned any words in anger or desire, or angry desire. Bitter love, unrequited love, joyous love, hopeless love, barbed-wire love, vicious love, viscous love, self-destructive love, anyway you want to play it and every combination. There are no new angles, but fuck it, what else are you gonna write about? The Queers write Love Songs for the Retarded.

Sandwiched on that record between the more direct paean to love-as-idiocy Teenage Bonehead and the fairly self-explanatory ode I Can't Stop Farting, sits Fuck the World (I'm Hanging Out With You) and it is, for me, the greatest ever love song ever primarily for two reasons: 1) my emotional capacity is a fundamentally limited beast best expressed in two minute pop-punk songs 2) this particular two minute pop-punk song perfectly captures the way that a relationship with someone you love is both an internal perpetual motion machine that often doesn't require interaction outside itself and an outward kicking force that does not give a fucking shit whose shit it fucks up.

I called in sick to work today and stayed in bed 'til noon

And now I just don't care what's going on outside this room

Things aren't getting better

My future's not too bright

Fuck the world I'm hanging out with you tonight

Me and you will walk around so pointlessly

Smashing things, jacked up on way too much caffeine

I'm really going no nowhere

I hate this shitty life

Fuck the world I'm hanging out with you tonight

In this song, love isn't a glorious thing, not in the exultant majestic sense of the word, anyhow. It's not a blanket to envelop everything in a warm homogeneous glow (fuck hippies yo), it's a twisted tight little thing that you cultivate in private spaces, in shared glances that crack the both of you up, all those silly little moments held as cradled weapons, when everything else in the world might be full of shit, to fire spitballs at life and all its annoyances from this perfect bundle of companionship, twitching in rhythm with in each other. It acknowledges the futility and smallness of these actions, their place as a because that's always been the fundamental optimist/pessimist question for me, beyond half-glasses of water, whether the light we find in our likes and loves, in people and records and moments with these things, makes the darkness seem all the darker or whether the presence of that pressing black around us makes the light brighter. Fuck the World raises that question but never answers it, it tumbles down with each line, another depressing gripe, another acknowledgement of futility but then that last shout brings you right back up. Fucking's better when the two of you are fucking the world at the same time. Does it bring you back up all the way? Is it enough? Who really knows. Some have made it enough. Probably more haven't. But it leaves you on that upwards shot, it's got the hope in the right place. Battle lines drawn, two vs billions, a war cry, a charge and a smile. Berserker confidence. Crazy dumb but unstoppable for now and all nows screamed high in the mix above thens or whens and what-ifs so it's all you can hear.

And I mention fucking there, because I've always read this song primarily in terms of romantic love, but this song is about more than just that narrow definition, it's about companionship, in any form, the second person perspective is never clarified, it could be sung from a Jude to a Phineas Poe, from an Old Jock to a Greyfriar's Bobby, from a Beavis to a Butthead. Any pairing of thrown together compatible biting souls, snapping at the loneliness that inhabits us, the rules, written and not, that bind our hands and stymie our steps. Any pairing that can bring itself together on the singalong whoa-oh-ohs when you're close past words, and then even past vocalising as the song rolls into simple guitar line that seems to capture that needling unity and companionship and the very essence of the song in a couple of notes, the way the best Screeching Weasel songs do too.

But a couple months ago, I got to see The Queers with the person I love, the person that I think about when I hear these sort of songs, and I had always sort of thought about that moment. We all project the vision of our worked over slick sung loves that we learnt from these songs and such onto the way we think the future will pan out and maybe all on some level think that there can't help but be a perfect melding of song, story and place. That as the song you love plays and the person you love stands next to you then it'll build into a moment greater than itself, a moment of battle-lines, two vs billions etc. The song will burst itself out onto reality and things will make absolute unholy sense for two minutes or so.

But what actually happened was, we were all physically shattered from three days of drinking and dancing and a night of fitful sleep on a 9-hour bus-ride punctuated by a couple of people in front of us swapping bible trivia as we rolled through little Florida towns in the early hours. Was it everything, was it all that I had imagined when I listened to that song alone and aching years ago and had romance painted for me in those two minutes. No, we were all so dead on our feet that I could barely stand-up and my girlfriend passed out on a bar-stool wearing sugar skull make-up and we left after about four songs, well before they got round to Fuck the World. Ah, well. That's how it works out. Art and music aren't everything, they're a bunch of touchstones and hot water bottles, they're vastly important, but they're not comprehensive documentary nor valid plans. The narratives we construct from them get knocked down, the perfect moments we imagine when the collision of life and art coalesces into a transcendent series of well-soundtracked kisses, that shit just doesn't work out like in the dumb movies, and the dumb songs, and the dumb books. The perfect song isn't always playing on the radio, the perfect movie isn't always on in the background of the bar to teach you some trite life-lesson on your third or fourth drink, to furnish you with a quick manageable epiphany. Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-ooooaa.

I don't need the Queers for that, the way I used to, I don't need to hang on to Fuck the World as a promise, a dream, but I still love the song, I'm still gonna listen to them, when I want some simple melody and refreshing snot, when I want a perfect picture of the whirling dervish of punk rock love, but I don't see it as an all-encompassing thing in the way I once got caught up in it, ideal for the sort of people kicked most of their ideals to pieces in exactly the sort of caffeine-jack rushes the song builds itself around. Maybe it's fuck Fuck the World I'm Hanging Out With You, I'm hanging out with you.

Flyer by Mitch Clem.

I love, and I know that those freewheeling itchy moments this love song so perfectly bottles and kisses exist, but I know that there's so much more to things than that, and that when those perfectly punk rock times present themselves then it's pretty fun to throw yourself into them and roll up in the collision of the various loves of your life, abstract and personal, when the music and life do accidentally fall in step for a few paces then I'm going to appreciate that and sing my fucking lungs red and dry but I don't need it the way I used to need it, I can say Fuck the World I'm Hanging Out With You without the song, but I'll still spin Love Songs for the Retarded when I want something simple and dumb and great, but I don't need to endlessly romanticise something that I've already got, to moon over a pantheon of bursts of verse and chorus from Cometbus' Punk Rock Love to a dozen cheapskate Thunder Roads and that Act 2, Scene 2, I know life to be better than romanticisation, but The Queers will still have that place in the wispy dreams that have touched me and shaped my stupid head, a spot in the fun of things. And besides, it's not like I'm gonna stop relating to I Can't Stop Farting anytime soon. Pfffffffffrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrp.

I started a podcast with a friend of mine.

2012-01-24T23:36:00.002Z

The name of this podcast is the Fullthrottlelazy podcast, named after the band me and him occasionally play about with, in turn named after a song by the third greatest punk band of all time (after Hickey and Old Skull) Fancy Pants and the Cellphones.

PODCAST EPISODE ONE

World/Inferno Friendship Society - I Am Sick of People Being Sick of My Shit
-
The Credentials - Energy Drinks for the Brokenhearted
Twat Sauce - Can’t Keep It Up
Star Fucking Hipsters - Ana Ng
-
Criaturas - Mentiras
The Slow Death - Opposite of Jesse’s Girl
Hank Wood & the Hammerheads - Shoulda Listen (to Mommah)
Girl in a Coma - Hope
-
The Gateway District - New Hands
Wiccans - Disorder
Empire Builder - justputRUSHonandwaitforthedrugstokickin
Night Birds - Born of Man and Woman
-
Burmese - Tim Jurg Gou Si Da Fei Gay
Crusades - Accomplice
Ramshackle Glory - Vampires are Poseurs (Song for the Living)
-
Brain F≠ - Seawall, See
Mischief Brew - A Lawless World
The Reaganomics - Ed Hardy
-
Big Business - Guns

PODCAST HOMEPAGE

A non-comprehensive guide to the best music of 2011 according to me

2012-01-24T23:07:00.003Z

Full lengths:
50. Something I haven't heard yet. No matter how hard I try, every year around February/March I discover or listen to one album from the previous year that completely blows my mind. It might be an album I've been meaning to listen to but haven't (this year I really wanted the Vaginors (ex-Bloodclot Faggots, heard a track or two on youtube and it's amazing) and Peer Precious albums (on Dirtcult and compared to Hickey) but I haven't got round to getting them yet) or more likely something I've never heard of before. So I'll reserve this place on the list for that as yet unlistened to masterpiece.
49. F-Bombers - Pledge Allegiance - Angry white man chants from professional musicians. Except with really strong female vocals. Sort of like that poppy New England street punk (Ducky Boys, Pinkerton Thugs etc). Not gonna tear the world apart but fun. Best songs: Whiskey and Cheap Wine, Working Class, Billy Bad-Ass
48. The Dauntless Elite - More Bloody Bad News - More bloody great songs. Extremely English pop-punk. Best songs: Better Than Nowt, Danson in the Dark, Thinkles
47. Flashlights - I'm Not Alone - Superchunk-style pop-punk. Best songs: Choking, It's Raining
46. The Manix - Neighborhood Wildlife - Singalong midwestern pop-punk. Yeah, that stuff. Just like your grandmother used to make. Provided your grandmother was in Rivethead. Best songs: Fingers Crossed, Red Truck, This Old House
45. Something Fierce - Don't Be So Cruel - Danceable punky indie-pop, or maybe danceable indie pop-punk. Something like that anyway. Best songs: Ghosts of Industry, Dying Young These Days
44. Dead to Me - Moscow Penny Ante - A return to straighter punk rock for one of my favourite punk bands of the last few years. Best songs: The World Gone Mad, The Monarch Hotel
43. Heartsounds - Drifter - Some modern day melodic punk rock combined with 90s skate punk and even a couple of metal solos thrown in for good measure. A compelling fusion of styles. Best songs: Race to the Bottom, You Are Not my Body
42. Girl in a Coma - Exits and All the Rest - Fantastic huge indie-rock tied together by incredible vocals. Best songs: Hope, Knocking at Your Door.
41. OBN IIIs - The One and Only - Saw these guys supporting the New Bomb Turks and it says a lot about their stage presence that they were memorable even when compared to possibly the greatest garage-punk band of all time. The album manages to capture the ferocity and anger of their live show. Pure garage rock. Best songs: If the Shit Fits, New Innocence

40. Omegas - Blasts of Lunacy - Blasts of lunacy. Best songs: Disgusting Fun, FSOM
39. The Copyrights - North Sentinel Island - It's a Copyrights album. The most singalong of singalong bands. This album seemed to have more bummer moments than they usually indulge in though. Best songs: Worn Out Passport, 20 Feet Tall
38. Dead Milkmen- The King In Yellow - Maybe it's just the knowledge of the tragic absence of Dave Blood, but this album really seems to highlight that melancholy tinge that the Dead Milkmen always had bubbling under their goofiness. A great comeback after a long time away. Best songs: The King in Yellow, Or Maybe It Is, Cold Hard Ground
37. Wugazi - 13 Chambers - It's Wu Tang and Fugazi. Perfect combination. Best songs: Ghetto Afterthought, Sleep Rules Everything Around Me, Shame On Blue
36. Elders - Blind Rage - Kind of crusty but well-rooted in classic 80s hardcore sounds and that's why I love it. Best songs: Blood on the Blade, Out of Spite, Philosophy Failures
35. Burmese - Lun Yurn - I listen to a shit-ton of noisy music, which means that I end up finding stuff that most people would consider loud and disruptive to be fairly relaxing. Sludge-metal is my chillout music of choice, but there's no way that you could ever relax while listening to this incredible slab of aggression and noise, it's like a kick in the face from an iron horse. Definitely gonna tear the world apart. Best songs: This isn't really a 'favourite songs' kind of album.
34. The Dwarves - Are Born Again - Here's a weird thing. The opening lines of this album proffer two, some would say contradictory, some would say complimentary, facets of The Dwarves' manifesto: #1 Let's Just Get High and Fuck Some Sluts! #2 A Cure for Cancer and for AIDS. while the first is business as usual for the jizz-punk shock-pop, and their usual miasma of pop-punk, garage and boooooobs, I'm not really sure about the second, I doubt it represents a maturing of these eternal adolescents but the weird thing is that shortly after this album came out I ended up reading two articles about serious advances in the search for cures to AIDS and cancer. This leads me to only one conclusion: The Dwarves have the power to rewrite history, I can only quiver in terror at what the global socio-political consequences of the song Working Class Hole will be. A goofy mix of punk rock snot and pure pop sensibilities.
33. Cobra Skulls - Agitations - Cobra Skulls maintain their usual irrepressible bouncy punk rock with what feels like more of an early-80s hardcore influence at times. Best songs: Solastalgia, Hiding, The Mess
32. Brain F - Sleep Rough - Manages to be sweet and very noisy at the same time. Garage punk/pop. Best songs: Seawall Sea, Sleep Rough, No More/More
31. Star Fucking Hipsters - From the Dumpster to the Grave - A fantastic guest verse from Boots Riley on one song, a really strong They Might Be Giants cover. Some of the strongest songwriting Stza has ever displayed, just, you know, ignore most of the lyrics unless you're 15. Best songs: Ana Ng, War Widows Vietnam, 911 til Infinity

30. Shards - Shards - Deeply dark, fantastically melodic hardcore punk. Best songs: DMT, Breeder Scum, Bleach
29. Mischief Brew - The Stone Operation - The usual compelling punk rock injected with the rebel sounds of a dozen folk-traditions. Best songs: Three-Cord Circus, Pompous Ass Manifesto, On the Sly
28. Pharoahe Monch - W.A.R. - One of the best MCs of all time delivers a timely sweeping political concept album. My favourite verse on this though is probably Jean Grae's turn on Assassins, she also put out a really solid mixtape this year and I can't wait for her album proper next year. Best songs: Assassins, W.A.R., Let My People Go
27. Fucked Up - David's Town - A stylistic exercise that also manages to be lots of fun and includes some incredible songs? Count me in. Best songs: Do You Feed?, Byrdesdale Spa FC
26. Good Luck - Without Hesitation - The first time I heard this album I rated it a lot higher but I got a bit tired of it. It doesn't have anything as simply perfect as Stars Were Exploding/Bringing Them Back to Life on Into Lake Griffy but still some wonderful noodly often melancholic pop-punk. Best songs: Novel Figure, Impossible
25. Fucked Up - David Comes to Life - This album is huge in every sense of the word. Giant in concept, execution and sound. I'll be honest, I didn't really invest in the rock opera aspect of it and taken as a whole it can be a little overwhelming, but there isn't a single bad song on this and for an album well over an hour long that's pretty incredible. Sweeping and triumphant. Best songs: Queen of Hearts, Lights Go Up, Running On Nothing
24. Wiccans - Skullduggery - Like Elders if they incorporated more melodic influences. Best songs: Disorder, Silver Lining
23. Underground Railroad to Candyland - Know Your Sins - Power-pop from one of the most consistent punk rock songwriters of the last 20 years. Best songs: My Number's on the Stall, We Aren't the World, The Wicked Shakes
22. Dude Jams - How to Abuse Everything - A bunch of songs about being fuck-ups who get fucked-up, like that 20 second Rivethead song in album form. Also the best cover art of the year. Best songs: Timebomb
21. Vacation - s/t - Somehow managed to be simultaneously poppier and noisier than their preceding seven inches, I was a little thrown off at first but on repeated listens I'm amazed how they've managed to develop their sound and integrate a bunch of different shit while still keep this a totally cohesive recognisably pop-punk album. Best songs: Cop Knock, Columbus is Not a Hero

20. The Reaganomics - Lower the Bar - The Reaganomics probably hate you and it's a shit-ton of fun. Favourite songs: Ed Hardy, Chireland, The WB
19. Caves - Homeward Bound - Catchier than the singles collection, same great vocals. Best songs: I'm Not Sorry, Homeward Bound
18. Midnight - Satanic Royalty - More metal than a devil horns thrown from the window of an 84 Camaro with flame decals full of long-haired seventeen year olds as they try and catch air from the humpback bridge just outside of town. Best songs: You Can't Stop Steel, Violence on Violence, Holocaustic Deafening
17. The Men - Leave Home - No idea what's going on here. Shoegaze, hardcore, punk rock, post-rock, drone and a bunch of other stuff all plastered together.into a big beautiful mess. Best songs: If You Leave..., Bastille
16. Tenement - Napalm Dream - More scratchy pop-punk. I am such a one-note motherfucker. This has less of that quirky shivering bounce of Future Virgins and more of an insistent rollicking rhythm with a bunch of drawn out WHOOOOOOOOOA backdrops. For an album so up-tempo and singalong a lot of the time it has an oddly downbeat feel, maybe because the singalongs are down more as tender harmonies, soft echoes of the foreground, rather than the shoutalong mania of The Copyrights. Maybe also because the it's one of those albums where the guitars, bass and drum don't really stand out for the most part but instead coalesce into a solid yawning base a lot of the time, they feel like an almost anonymous bedrock, an insistent engine grumble. They have spikier slower numbers like Dreaming Out Loud and When Time Caught Up which trip and squawk a bit. My favourite moment is the opener when it all drops out into fuzzy bass and the builds into a singalong that pushes out past the music at the end of the song. Best songs: Stupid Werld, A Death in the Family
15. High Tension Wires - Welcome New Machine - Supremely catchy speedy power-pop jams. Best songs: Lose Face, Incorporeal, The Secret of the Hydrogen Bomb
14. Red City Radio - Dangers of Standing Still - I kind of wrote this off the first time I listened to it, I've got a bit burnt out on that big-sounding anthemic post-Gaslight punk rock that bands like Banquets play, but I gave this another listen a few months later and it's all so well put together that it made me remember why I liked this particular style of music in the first place. Every whoa-oh and riff is perfectly timed, but never cynically so, it all feel likes a natural progression in order to get you through to the next glorioussingalong. Perfectly executed punk rock. Can't wait to see them. Best songs: Spinning in Circles is a Gateway Drug, Drinking Ourselves Into the Future
13. Criaturas - Oscuridad Eterna - Ex-Deskonicidos. Female vocals. Spanish lyrics. Catchy as shit hardcore punk. Pulls in a bunch of Japanese burning spirits hardcore influences in the guitar work. Best songs: Criaturas, Nunca Va a Cambiar, Esperanza
12. The World/Inferno Friendship Society - The Anarchy and the Ecstasy - Another fine collection of cabaret-punk stompers and beautiful slower quieter numbers. This time round they eschew the conceptual topics of Addicted to Bad Ideas and instead focus the most part on songs about shitty deadend jobs, drunken parties, stealing cars from members of well-known street-punk bands, the same sort of things that most of these noisy snotty bands sing about, but enshrined in swing and ragtime these topics feel altogether more mythic. Best songs: I am Sick of People Being Sick of my Shit, The Politics of Passing Out, The Disarming Smile
11. Turkish Techno - Past Due - Nothing on this is quite as perfect as the song Meth Not Meat but it's still a collection of ridiculously fun snotty pop-punk that I can't stop listening to. Best songs: A Letter to Mike xVx, Breakfast of Champions, Little Lies,

10. Ramshackle Glory - Live the Dream - It's been a long journey for Pat the Bunny but he seems like he's doing alright now. Around this album the dreaded 'm' word flutters and makes itself insistent, yes this is an album more mature than the teenage fuck yous of Johnny Hobo but he's retained the energy, talent and way with a catchy phrase. It's definitely not mellowed out either, sometimes that pissy seventeen year old screech still breaks out and it manages to deftly incorporate that overdriven guitar that you can hear on the earliest Johnny Hobo demos. It's great to hear someone coming to terms with themselves in a constructive artistic way and making great music from that transition. Ben Weasel, this ain't. Best songs: Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, Vampires are Poseurs
9. Crusades - Sun is Down and the Night is Riding In - Existing in an odd warm spot between Agent Orange and Samiam, Crusades play a melodic yet sinister brand of pop-punk. And they hate god. Fuck yeah. Best songs: Beacons, Dreamers, Driven
8. Future Virgins - Western Problems - Future Virgins are a pop-punk band from Chattanooga, Tennessee, a town I know nothing about apart from the fact that it has a name that's really fun to say and seems to excel at producing bands aimed solely aimed with pinpoint precision at my eardrums, sloppy scratchy pop-punk like ADD/C and The Jack Palance Band (they might share members with those bands but I'm not sure). In contrast to the three stunningly good seven inches the band put out before this full-length, they've incorporated some more Jammy bouncy power-pop stuff reminiscent of Used Kids and Tranzmitors. It's all a bit more smoothed down than the EPs and at first I wasn't into that but with repeated listens I've come around. They've got a bit of the twinkle of Good Luck to their guitars which I don't recall hearing before and the singing occasionally slips into more of a croon whereas before it yelped and bit more. It even has a few rolling melancholy stretches nestled on the likes of None of Them in between all it's spiky miniature upstart rock and roll. I think I'm still more into the rougher scrapes of the seven inches but this is still great. Best songs: Ruin Me, Bitter Eyes, Troubled Heart
7. Burning Sensation - s/t - What Night Birds are to Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, this band are to Husker Du's Land Speed Record. Furious and melodic. Erratic and brilliant. There's a song called I Fear Erections. Best songs: Weeping Wound, I Feel Disgust, Kitchen Knife
6. True Sons of Thunder - Spoonful of Seedy Dudes - A handful of veteran Memphis musicians come together to make this album that sounds like Flipper decided to try and write a straight rock and roll album but remembered half-way through that they were Flipper and ended up with this weird garage sludge/dirge punk masterpiece. Best songs: Nate the Rat, Killin' It, Wood Shampoo
5. The Credentials - Goocher - These guys are splitting up and it sucks. Furious snotty songs with smarter lyrics than you can usually expect from pop-punk. Best songs: Sex Dream, Energy Drinks for the Broken Hearted, I Killed 122 Iraqis and All I Got Was This Lousy Engineering Degree
4. The Gateway District - Perfect's Gonna Fail - The best dualing vocals in punk rock. Best songs: New Hands, Fishman's Story, Queen Ave
3. The Slow Death - Born Ugly Got Worse - Featuring the principle songwriters of both The Ergs! and Pretty Boy Thorson and the Falling Angels, these guys have some serious brokenhearted credentials. Catchy and gruff-voiced and imbued with some real stinking of whiskey blues. Best songs: Dirty Jokes, Ticks of the Clock, Phantom Limbs
2. Bomb the Music Industry! - Vacation - These guys never disappoint. It opens with an insistent piano riff that teases at you delaying the inevitable burst of noise for far longer than you expect and then after that rolls into the same sort of wild mash of synth hooks, horn riffs and punk noise that constitute the screamalong anthems of twentysomething disillusionment that BTMI! have perfected. Best songs: Shit That You Hate, Everybody That You Hate, Why Oh Why Oh Why (Oh Oh Oh Oh)
1. Night Birds - The Other Side of Darkness - Everything I said about their seven inch collection applies here. Those early 80s skate-punk sounds all torn up and injected with with rippling beach noise. Dick Dale drunk and disorderly and shot through with Adolescent threat. Hawaii 5-0 Police Truck. They're also amazing live. Best songs: Oblivious, Born of Man and Woman

Collections:
5. Direct Hit! - Domesplitter - I wish these guys had put out an album of new material (the new seven inches they put out are fucking great) rather than just rerecording their older stuff. Still, not a single bad song on here.
4. Hard Skin - We're the Fucking George - Oi! Oi!
3. The Muffs - Kaboodle - It's the goddamn Muffs. Everything that isn't on one of their full-lengths including a few great new songs to show they're still making great music.
2. Night Birds - Fresh Kills Vol. 1 - The best modern day punk rock money or sexual favours can buy.
1. Pretty Boy Thorson and the Falling Angels - Let's Go Home - Country-punk. I've noticed how often I describe bands as sort of falling into one sound rather than the other. PBT and the FnAs are definitely like that with their two genres. Though they're clearly country in a lot of ways, they don't exhibit much twang in their sound compared to a bunch of other country-influenced punk bands, it's more just that classic heartbroken catchy country mode pushed as hard and fast as it'll go.

Other stuff (demos/EPs/singles/splits):
25. School Jerks - Control - Sounds like something a bunch of pissed off 14 year olds recorded in 1981 and then forgot about for thirty years.
24. Hold Tight! - Call the Zoo - Like I said, I've got a little bored with a lot of shoutalong punk bands, I think I'd like those bands a lot more if they got all their songs done with in 50 seconds like Hold Tight! do.
23. Omegas - NY Terminator - More of the same form this great hardcore band.
22. Nazi Dust - Wretched Hour - It's got ten songs, but it's way shorter than Big Business' release this year. Screechy fast hardcore punk. Only one song scrapes two minutes, the others all hover around 60 seconds. Angry angry stuff.
21. Fidlar - DIYDUI - Lo-fi surfy power-pop.
20. Cervix - Winter Tour Tape - This was either recorded in someone's bedroom or in the bowels of hell itself. Furious hardcore punk and vocals that sound like the echoing screams of the damned.
19. Leagues Apart - Buffalo Club - Anthemic pop-punk songs that alternate in subject between going out and having a miserable time and staying in and having a miserable time. So like a bunch of shit, but with British accents, so even closer to home than usual.
18. Personal and the Pizzas - Diet, Crime and Delinquency - Hey man dis is kinda a personal one to me yaknowwaddamean? Dese boys really rock, yaknow? Yeah, good job pizzas. I'm serious man.
17. Direct Hit!/Tit Patrol - Tit Patrol are a lot of fun and DH! prove they haven't lost their knack of writing incredibly infectious singalong pop-punk songs. Mutant Drunk in particular manages to sound exactly like what a song you'd write about being drunk should sound like. Stumbling and chaotic and still screaming at the top of its lungs.

16. The Dopamines/Dear Landlord - Dopamines and Dear Landlord prove that too.
15. Vacation - Dream Dad - Fuzzy pop-punk at its finest.
14. Big Business - Quadruple Single - Four fantastic sludge-metal tunes, the highlight is the final song Guns and the way it descends into noise towards the end of the song. GUNS! GUNS! GUNS ARE BETTER THAN EVERYTHING ELSE!
13. Little Ease - s/t - Short and snappy punk rock. Really great strained but clear vocals.
12. Chixdiggit - Safeways, Here We Come - Took six years to put out this EP but when the songs are as perfect as this then who cares? Swedish Rat is possibly the best song ever written about a haircut.
11. Iron Chic/Pacer - I've always enjoyed Iron Chic more than Pacer until this split. I don't know what happened but Pacer stepped their game up and released the two best songs they've ever done. The Iron Chic songs aren't bad either.
10. Sros Lords - Evil Spawn - Weird synth/garage/psych punk.
9. Punch - Nothing Lasts - Punch are one of my favourite hardcore bands around at the moment. I always think of them as a sort of hardcore Jack Palance Band, not because they sound anything similar, but because The Jack Palance Band wrote fully formed songs that never lasted more than 90 seconds. They were in and out before you knew it but it never felt like they'd cut the song short, or that they were doing a gimmicky thing like Short Attention and their catalogue of 25 second pop-punk ditties. Punch are often associated with powerviolence and fastcore, fun blasts of brief rage like Threatener, but Punch's songs are slightly more expansive than that, they always feel like they've got a structure and purpose beyond dogmatically sticking to Jello Biafra's I LIKE SHORT SONGS creed (now long, long forgotten by Biafra himself). Punch like short songs. They also like anguished shrieks, steamroller heavy guitars, always keeping you on your toes with tempo and style changes (this is usually something that turns me off hardcore but with the brevity of the songs it really works) and generally taking your fucking head off.

8. The Slow Death - Turnstile Comix #1 - Four songs about heartbreak and a great comic to go with it.
7. Shit Creek - Lust for Brains - Sounds like a cross between region rock pop-punk and Oi! I love both those things.
6. Criaturas - Arañas en el Corazon - Lower-fi than the full-length. Same sort of amazing shit.
5. Twat Sauce - Demo 2 - These guys sound like if Good Luck got really wasted and recorded all their stuff in a toilet. I like Good Luck a lot, but I'm pretty sure I'd like them more if they spent less time learning their instruments and more time getting wasted.
4. Smash Detox 7" - Members of a bunch of great Japanese and American hardcore bands come together to coincidentally make a seven inch that sounds like the best parts of Japanese and American hardcore.
3. Unfun/Stymie - Two of my favourite current punk bands on one seven inch.
2. Hank Woods and the Hammerheads 7" - Three stompy rockers drowning in garagitude. Like the Mummies never unundied.
1. Empire Builder demo - Don't know anything about this band but my friend sent me this demo and I just can't stop listening to it. Yes, like a lot of other stuff here it's scratchy pop-punk, but it's not afraid to spread its wings a bit on songs like justputRUSHonandwaitforthedrugstokickin. The vocalist also kind of sounds like Stza. In a good way. I love these songs.

Live sets:
15. Chixdiggit! @ The Garage, Islington - It's kind of weird to see Chixdiggit in the flesh as their lead singer has such a distinctive voice it's kind of weird to hear it coming out of a real person. See also: Kepi Ghoulie. A long set, everything I could've wanted them to play. One the most extreme power stances in existence.
14. The Dwarves @ Camden Underworld - They covered a Ting Tings song. The show ended with a stripper shooting sparks into the crowd using a disc sander applied to her crotch. Yep, it's a Dwarves show.
13. The Slow Death @ Durty Nelly's, Fest - Their singalongs are even more singalong when you can actually singalong to them. Also contains 100% Taylor Swift breakdowns than most other punk bands.
12. D4 @ Florida Theater, Fest - Duhnuhnuh-nuh-nuhnuh-nuh-nuhnuh-nuh. D! 4!
11. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists @ Florida Theater, Fest - Ted Leo is pretty much responsible for my entire relationship with my girlfriend so seeing him with her and bouncing about like crazy during Me and Mia was amazing.
10. Dead to Me @ Florida Theater, Fest - Took a long time for me to get round to seeing these guys and they were incredible. Ended up crushed at the bottom of the crowd underneath one of the band.
9. World/Inferno Friendship Society @ Camden Underworld - Lost count of how many times I've seen WIFS but they always put on an amazing show.
8. Los Mendozas @ Cafe El Paso, Hoxton - I think these guys have stopped playing shows now but I'm glad I caught them a couple of times while they were around. Four guys in luchador masks with terrible speedy gonzales style fake-Mexican accents playing 5 one minute thrash songs about wrestling, the rest of their 35 minute set was taken up with arguing with the audience and each other.
7. Vacation Bible School @ Durty Nelly's, Fest - Punk rock fun times.
6. TV Casualty @ Florida Theater, Fest - Half pisstake, half-tribute. Opened with Danzig's Shopping List, closed with Mother, played all my favourite Misfits songs along the way. So much fun. When I sang into the mic on Hybrid Moments I sang the words to Hungry Moments by the Misfats.
5. Pretty Boy Thorson and the Falling Angels @ Durty Nelly's, Fest - After the Slow Death I skipped Worthwhile Way in order to catch the Copyrights, then I ran back across the street to catch Cletus unaware that they had cancelled and been replaced with the Falling Angels, a band I love even more. A totally drunken singalong mess that ended up with everyone on stage for Remember the Lilies of the God Damned Field.
4. Night Birds @ The Grosvenor, Stockwell - The lead singer looked incredibly pissed-off throughout. The guitarist spent the entire gig throwing himself about like a madman and almost twatted a photographer who kept sticking a flash in his face. So good.
3. The Arrivals @ 8 Seconds, Fest - Sunday at Fest I was just fucking out of it for most of the day. I spent most of the day just sitting on the floor in Durty Nelly's as I was so tired, but Future Virgins were a pick-me-up and then I got to see Kyle Kinane and I laughed until my face hurt, then I ran back to 8 Seconds and caught the second half of the Measure (SA)'s final show which was a great bittersweet moment then The Arrivals came on and it felt like everybody in the room was smiling. A really fat guy crowdsurfed and everyone just giggled as they pushed him over the top. They ended on Simple Pleasures in America and a bunch of people from various bands I love jumped on stage to carry on the singalong that went on for a long long time after the set finished. Amazing finish to an incredible weekend.
2. New Bomb Turks @ Red 7, Austin - Never thought I'd get to see these guys live. Fighting with the number one band on this list for the title of best garage punk band ever. Eric Davidson bounced about the stage like a madman and Defiled and Born Toulouse Lautrec in particular were incredible.
1. Guitar Wolf @ Islington Academy - ROCK AND ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!

So Scratched Into Our Souls #10: New Bomb Turks - Born Toulouse Lautrec

2011-11-16T21:48:00.001Z

"...if there is a god, he's only concerned with artists. Specifically those of us who possess both skill and energy. And he only troubles himself long enough to swat us down like horseflies just before we become his rivals." - Sam Edwine in Tom Bradley's Killing Bryce

When I was 17 I thought I was an artist. I thought I was pretty fucking great. And I found this album that was called Destroy, Oh Boy! and the first track was called Born Toulouse Lautrec (still a fantastic pun 20 years after it was released) and over a breakneck gunk punk swell it kicked to pieces my puny artistic exceptionalism. NO HEROES, NO LEADERS, NO ARTISTS, NO GODS. It screamed. I'm a worker, you're a worker, would you like to be a worker too? Eviscerating the high minded rhetoric of the ultracrepidarian artist with a sarcastic superspeed sneer and years after I've heard it, when I must've heard it dozens of times, when I've sang along to it on a warm Texas November night with Eric Davidson strutting, twitching and mincing across a low stage, it still makes me smile, still holds me true, because I know a lot of writers and artists, I am a writer, and let's face it, we're wankers. But that's okay, I'm a wanker, you're a wanker, wouldn't you like to be a wanker too? Because if there were just artists and no plumbers we'd have endless beautiful villanelles and murals about what it was like to be covered in shit all the time, a thousand loves in a time of cholera, rather than what we have which is endless beautiful novels and plays about what it's like to be drowning in metaphorical shit all the time, but go the other way and we'd all have immaculate crappers but no way of properly articulating our appreciation for it (there's a big chunk of Don Delillo's Underworld all about bowel movements as a metaphor for traveling into communist countries).

It's all a job and as such it fills your days and changes the way you perceive the world, whether your mindless furniture shop job leaves you absent-mindedly assessing the kitchen units in every new house, you visit, line names and serial numbers and styles reeling unbidden in your head, or the restless desire to make art about the world turns you into a constant vulture for your own emotional damage. Kicking about in the dirt, we scrabble about for commission, a speck of cash for the way you've said something, in paint or words or notes, about the way the world works, the way people spin. And then you take that measley cheque and spend it on a beer, or to fix the washing machine, or something mundane while the steady trudging monthly pay from a day job is getting thrown away on art supplies, or too many books, or saved up for that guitar hanging like a teardrop in the music shop window with which you plan to pour everything you've got into a furious garage thrum, panicky riffs to staple to jackhammer drumbeats and switchblade lyrics to pummel, gut and pull apart the stupid fucking certainties of another 17 year old and rearrange their head so they gasp and mouth to themselves in shit and wonder, "Destroy... oh boy..."

"ART: A Friend of mine in Tulsa, Okla., when Iwas about eleven years old. I'd be interested to hear from him. There are somany pseudos around taking his name in vain." - The Hipcrime Vocab, Chad Mulligan (from John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar)

So Scratched into Our Souls #9: Discount - Portrait of a Cigarette

2011-10-27T23:04:00.000+01:00

Before the supergroup swagger of The Dead Weather, the stripped down hit of the Kills, there was a cheap little teenage punk band from Florida called Discount. A short song: Portrait of a Cigarette. Where as the guitar seems to fall away in the background like discarded ash, Alison Mosshart draws a simple pictogram about the basic shape of things, a cigarette as a line and a circle, ashstray as a square in a circle. And from these geometric beginnings, she sketches out the shape of a relationship, any relationship, breathing in the burning, between the people who are square pegs in round holes, the temporary community of a promethean cadging, an offering of flame. The kaleidoscope of life paired down to each individual shape, through a fantasm moment, maybe just a single sung minute, of clarity and calmness offered by a friend smoked down to the filter, and it reminds me of when I was about eleven I remember coming across a riddle that went

Make three-fourths of a cross,
And a circle complete;
And let two semicircles
On a perpendicular meet;
Next add a triangle
That stands on two feet;
Next two semicircles,
And a circle complete.

And I was baffled until I scratched out the shapes and found that it spelt TOBACCO, and when the scratchy song finishes I flick back and press the triangle in the circle on the square and marvel at its shape again and when you screw down the cigarette sometimes you find the spell broken.

take a circle. and a straight line. put a match against the open end. feel it burning. see the burning. breathe the burning. until it's extinguished again. all those distinctions. clearly ashes in a circle on a square. i stare across it all at you. you stare through it at me. are you still there? are you bent up? being burned out. are you foggy. am i trying now? am i straightening? am i dumping out the circle but hanging on to you? are you lonely in this square? i'm lonely in this cube.

A Weaselmania Of My Own: Part One

2011-10-23T21:23:00.000+01:00

"Ben Weasel, he's an asshole/Ben Weasel, he's a jerk/Ben Weasel, you just hate him cos he don't have to work" - Ben Weasel, The Queers

So on March 18th of this year, as everyone who would possibly be interested in the topic knows, Ben Weasel punched two women in the face at a show at SXSW in Austin, Texas. The event and the resulting fallout were just depressing. Larry Livermore's reaction was probably the most balanced that I encountered, and he's someone who has known Ben Weasel for a long time, but for the most part people quickly divided themselves into two opposing sides. In one corner, long rants about the prevalence of domestic abuse and the social and moral implications of male violence towards women that basically came to the conclusion that Ben Weasel is a misogynist scumbag and patriarchy personified, and then on the other side, a series of outraged shouting about personal responsibility and how anyone acting in the way the first woman who got punched did should probably not be surprised when they find a fist in their jaw, you know those arguments which are generally summed up by a slogan made up of a brief rhyming couplet: EQUAL RIGHTS! EQUAL FIGHTS! or TALK SHIT! GET HIT! (this is something that seems to be especially prevalent in the discourse of the hardcore community, it's like Scott Vogel possessed by Etrigan, I'm wondering if you could start a twitter feed that consists solely of analysing the genre in this manner: NO FINER BET! THAN MINOR THREAT! BETTER NOT RISK IT! GORILLA BISCUITS! FRIENDS AND STRANGERS! WE ALL LOVE DANGERS! I HATE THIS FAKE TOWN! I'LL EXPLAIN IN THE BREAKDOWN! EVERY EARTH CRISIS LYRIC OF NOTE! SOUNDS LIKE A PUNISHER QUOTE! I think it could be a success, although you'd probably quickly run out things that rhyme with 'x'.)

First things first, I don't think the women who got punched should've been punched. One of the them was clearly just instinctually intervening on behalf of a friend, and the other one, well, as obnoxious as she was acting, I think anyone in their 40s, man or woman, should probably have progressed to the stage that they don't respond with a haymaker to the almighty attack of a thrown ice cube, especially if the person who's suffered the infintesimally small indignity of being aggressively cubed spent 40-odd minutes beforehand deliberately provoking the group of people from which the fateful chip of frozen water was flung. But while I don't think those women should've been hit under pretty much any circumstance, I also don't believe that Ben Weasel is a misogynist.

I don't think Ben Weasel is a misogynist. I do think he's a massive fucking twat. The only thing that shocked me about the whole incident was that anyone could actually be surprised when Ben went all Rocky Marciano in Austin, everyone I know responded with something amounting to a resigned sigh and maybe a rueful "Jesus Christ, Ben." Because we don't hate Ben Weasel because he doesn't have to work. We do hate him because he is an arsehole, whatever Joe Queer might think. He's spent 25 years acting like a contrarian dickhead, and so it's not that much of a leap when that apparently pathological snotty desire to piss people off mutates in an angry uncontrolled moment of physical expression. Come And See The Violence Inherent In The System. Every single one of his MRR columns that I've read basically consists of him picking something people like and explaining why anyone who likes it is a fucking moron for liking it and should probably die. Okay, I'll admit that does sound like a fairly amusing act, but when it's all you ever do, then it stops feeling like an act. It's like that the Kurt Vonnegut novel Mother Night where he illustrates the way the lead character is tainted by their time working as an American spy for the Nazis and although he did his moral duty in a fine important way and helped the war effort, the pain he caused and the hate he inspired in his cover identity take their toll. Vonnegut sums up his theme in typically Vonnegutian insightful brevity with the phrase "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." He's not saying there that if you're an Elvis impersonator you're going to end up dying on the toilet, what he's saying is that pretending to be an arsehole is in itself inescapably kind of an arsehole thing to do (just as pretending to be nice to people can actually result in you being nice to people.) If you want it in hardcore terms: fake it til you accidentally make it.

So he's an arsehole, but what are we going to do about that? Screeching Weasel's music means a fuck of a lot to me. It has pulled me through some really tough times. A lot of people who make really great art are shitty people, Bukowski was a complete dick, but his novels and poetry are beautiful evocations of the drunken washed-out struggle of so many people. Bukowski's hero was Celine, who was an even better writer than Bukowski, even more acute in his laceration of hypocracy and his wry amazement at the special little human moments, he was also an even bigger fucking cunt, a raving anti-semite and a complete misogynist, a misanthropic fascist who ended up despising pretty much everyone. In punk rock, Bad Brains have a reputation for homophobia, but their best music still sounds vital 30 years after it was made, far more so than MDC's stringently left-wing responses to it. It really becomes trickier if a great work is in itself ideologically shitty, like DW Griffiths' Birth of a Nation which is massively important in the development of American cinema, but is also virulently racist in an incredibly vile way (though it should be mentioned Griffiths was so mortified by this accusation he immediately bankrupted himself with a massive budget film about the evils of intolerance and later directed the first attempt at an cinematic interracial romance), but that doesn't really apply here, there is nothing genuinely hateful in the music of Screeching Weasel, pissy, yes, but that's key to their appeal.

So he's an arsehole, but so what? My friend Tommy's response to the Weasel debacle was "Good thing we're punks so we don't have to have heroes." which made me smile as Tommy usually does, but it doesn't take it all the way, because while I don't want to get into a whole real Death of the Author debate here and while I think art can live beyond its creator, Ben Weasel wrote those songs, Ben Weasel sings those songs. And he's a gaping arsehole. And I think an important part of punk is recognising the fact that we identify with art made by arseholes, and that's probably because we're sort of arseholes too.

The fact that Ben Weasel is an arsehole is part of what makes him a good songwriter in his way, just as the misanthropy of Celine is what allowed his satire to be razor sharp let's stop pretending that we're into this music because we're all lovely unique glorious people, to a certain extent the noise of the music is mirroring those ragged shitty parts of ourselves that we can never really expunge, even if we wanted to, which we don't because we've built those shitty parts into castle walls and radio towers, fending off the besieging armies of conformity to an imaginary mainstream ideal, broadcasting our loathing and limp-wrist-in-the-air defiance to similar fuck-ups. If we were nice people then maybe we'd all just be listening to ethereal waft of flowery pop-folk, not twisted angry facsimiles of pop songs and unruly streams of noise and bloody-throated screams. If we were really nice people, we'd never actually know there was a distinct genre called crust, or powerviolence, or goregrind. And what greater example of that internal division of than a man who punched two women in the face on stage also being the man who sang (although didn't write) Going Home, the finest punk song about how the destructive power of gender stereotypes is harmful to everyone, male or female, about how it's not about a war of the sexes, the shittiness of these patterns of violence and mistrust is such that it's an indelible psychic stain on everyone obscuring our abilities to connect to each other as just fellow human beings.

Let's also stop pretending that people fit in to simple categories of good and bad, let's stop imagining that every artist, friend, hero, politician, relative, cop, person isn't a complex human being built from an assortment of contradictory beliefs and experiences that may not sit logically with each other according to some grand scheme. Solidarity is fucking great, but it's slippery. It's a constantly shifting bind of allegiances and shared aims, vicious disagreements and mutual antagonism. It's fucking the human condition is what the fuck it is. We're not all beautiful delicate flowers, we're not all pricks either. We're roses. (OH GOD! That was such. A. Fucking. CHEESEBALL. Line. Though it fitted so well that once it popped into my head that I knew immediately that I was both going to use it because deep down [or on the surface maybe] I'm a high school poetry sort of motherfucker, even if I kind of hated myself for thinking of it and knew I'd probably have to parenthetically acknowledge its shitty corniness to prevent large swathes [4 people] of the readership bailing immediately as soon as they comprehended the full scale of its cheeseball nature. I apologise)

We're not perfect beautiful models of perfection, no one is, but especially not us, because in the embrace of punk rock to me there is an implicit rejection of that search for a smooth unblemished notion of beauty. You can still dress up nice, make yourself up, do your hair, reject every crust-punk convention, but the love for something so raw and angry betrays an essential coarseness to you or to me. We don't just accept those broken bits, we mold them into a shield, into a fluttering proud standard. We're the sort of ugly people that find ugliness beautiful. That live and love in the dry cracks in skin, the flabby folds in flesh, in the dirty smears on grinning faces, singing loud songs, telling each other sick jokes and desperate stories and all of our scars are norse fucking sagas.

(This sort of point cropped up in a discussion I was having with my friend Drew about cultural redemption narratives and their relationship to punk rock. "I get almost resentful, like it takes trauma to be broken enough to walk down that road. Most of my real trauma happened because of, not as an impetus for, punk rock." which led me to liken punk rock to a Simpsons joke, and because he is in the same age demographic as me and the joke was from seasons 1-8, even though I did not specify the joke, he immediately knew which one I was talking about, as you probably do reading this. THIS IS A TEST.

From this I can only extrapolate that punk rock's IF IT AIN'T BROKE, LET'S BREAK IT! spirit is equally applied to people as it is to nation-states, police cars and guitar strings and my friend's friends were all secretly dancing with glee behind his back chanting "ONE OF US! ONE OF US!" as they led him into a series of a confusing and messy social situations and relationships. It's a serious drug, you just want the high, but you don't realise that there's no way of getting there without embracing all the strung-out inhuman mess that comes with it.)

It's a scene made up of the kind of guys that put Code Blue on a mixtape for a girl they really like, the kind of girls that give their boyfriend about whom they're just starting to believe there's more there than a fun fling a copy of the SCUM Manifesto on their one-month anniversary, lovingly inscribed (i's with hearts for dots and all) with the dedication "This is why you are beneath me", as well as a whole fuckload of people who don't really care for the whole boy/girl deal but instead of trying to fit in or not make a big deal about it walk round with a mouth full of "Fuck you. This is who I am. Take your prehistoric binary notions of gender and sexuality and choke on them, you fucking relic."

So shocked that we find ourselves in a place where people often seem really interesting and smart or at least dumb and fucking cool, we test it. We push it to see how far it will accept us. We compete to show off our disaffection and distraction from the notions of conformity, and in doing so of course just create a different type of conformity that then must be reacted against as well in this endless fucking stupid pisshearted chain of chimerical explosions, regrettable tattoos and basement shows.

It's a scene made up of those kinds of people, who do those kinds of things, and then still get the uncomfortable inner tug that maybe they stepped too far outside the lines this time. Because we don't live our lives as Johnny Rotten or Poly Styrene or Guitar Wolf or Jello Biafra or Pig Champion, though we ache and shoot for that, though we use them as crutches and patches, bright crusty stitching on Gein-chic skin suit chainsmoke mailroom disguises. We spent most of our time stumbling on through as John, Marianne and Seiji, Eric and Tom, and that duality, that snotty-mouthed swagger/snotty-nosed terror, run-your-mouth/heart-in-your-mouth dichotomy that we bounce and swing between is exactly the teenage freakshow that Screeching Weasel at their best have always been able to perfectly articulate.

And you kind of feel sorry for Ben Weasel a bit, because I think as you get older you generally kind of get a bit better for the most part at reconciling the furious certainty that makes up some of your teenage years, and the chaotic insecurity and self-loathing that makes up the rest of it, the circles merge until it's no longer a dichotomy but more like a happy chubby Venn diagram we've found a warm spot in the middle of, but Ben Weasel does not seem to have done that. Just as Celine's hatefulness was what provided him with the perfect outsider perspective to lance societal hypocrisy, it was also what warped him into a fascist prick, Ben Weasel's continual oscillation between stark self-awareness and self-justificatory blather has led to so many perfect anthems of alienation, fun TV party ditties and ra-ra-ra-Ramones riot story songs, it's also led to him being a fucking dickhead burning bridges like they're dandelion seedheads. He's been an adolescent for three decades. And I am so fucking grateful to have struggled out of my teenage angst somewhat (mid-20s angst is a fucking piece-of-piss in comparison), I couldn't imagine dragging that amount of weight for another 20 fucking years.

But he's finally left that dance behind it seems for the most part, and just decided to stick with the self-righteous angry part. The final song on Screeching Weasel's 2011 offering, First World Manifesto (which is catchy as anything) is about the stupid notion of punk celebrity with apparent specific aim at Brendan Kelly of the Lawrence Arms, but every single line feels like it could be about the person singing it. Maybe he knows this, maybe it's all a bigger subtler joke than I'm giving him credit for but it doesn't seem to be. He's finally broken out of the pattern of catch-an-epiphany and release-hell, but rolled out, not into the quietitude that many aging artists find, the confidence of self-knowledge, but into the almost sole fury of the Unimpeachable Weasel. Maybe he's losing it, or maybe it's just that he can't seem to modulate himself with other people as well as he used, but stuck in this anger rut, it's been a turbulent snipey few years for Mr Weasel, even by his standards, and the few moments where he does seem to get that he's not all that (I mean, he's ALL THAT sometimes, but he's all that because he didn't always think he was all that, or always say he was) then he's switching back quicker and more sharply between something recognisably identifiable as the work of a person who knows they're a person (the initial humility of his apology after SXSW) and the self-righteousness with which he crafts his public missives (the long, rambling [I'm kettlepotting tremendously with those two words used in a pejorative fashion] half-smart half-stupid all-pretty-fucking pathetic comeback blog post where he explained exactly how perfectly right he was about everything after all). He increasingly seems like he believes his own bullshit, or to put it another way, he's stuck as Ben Weasel and can't remember who Ben Foster was, whereas his creative spark was always the introspection and humanity of Foster delivered with the salty smirk of Weasel. And man, that's gotta be shitty, there's not gotta be a lot of peace in that.

You kind of just want to give Ben Weasel a hug and say "Look, you don't have to push against us so much. We like you. Some of the time. If you could tone down that whole "I'm Ben Weasel. Fuck you!" just a little bit, it'd be really great. This is a cool place. And while we're not going to agree with everything, you're going to say, we really are as good as you're gonna get."

Of course though, that sort of genuine honesty is probably not going to get past this hard outer shell of disaffection and anger, so he'll continue doing the dumb shit we hate, but his music, at its best (and it is currently really really not at its best) can save a fucking life. And I know that, because when I repeat those magic words of "punk rock saved my life" that many have uttered sheepishly, declaimed loudly, carved into desks and brick knowing them to be true as a sunrise, Screeching Weasel are one of the bands at the forefront of my mind.

"I am here not by choice but by my birth. For so many years I doubted my own worth it's no coincidence I ended up where I'm at now I'm here to tell you that you can't kick me out 'cause I'm a permanent part of this society the blackest sheep amongst a crowd of them I'm not the glue that holds this scene together but I have arrived here by way of dirty looks and rejection and head scratching shrink and frustrated parents and teachers just like so many did before me and will after me go ahead and laugh at me you can afford to laugh I can't 'cause this is all I have I'm not proud I'm not ashamed but this is all I have and it's good enough for me and I am through following your truth I'm making my own rules. My own world, my own rules."

- Screeching Weasel, The Scene

Yeah, we've all felt like that sometimes, right? But Ben can no longer claim that position, because every new piece of news on the band still meets dozen of detractors ripping the piss out of the whole Weasel canon or praising the gloriously funny Max Levine Ensemble diss EP it will also have at least a few obsequious fanboys repeating by rote the screeching wheeze that PUNK IS ABOUT PISSING PEOPLE OFF AND HE DOES THAT! Or that PUNK IS ABOUT REJECTING TRADITION AND HE DOES THAT! which is exactly the same colossal pile of magic bullshit that Michael Graves trotted out for the ridiculous ConservativePunk website that sprung up in response to PunkVoter around 2004. (For the record, and I cannot reiterate this enough, punk rock is not really about breaking from tradition, it is about the right to choose which tradition you fit into, building and inhabiting a system of your own not necessarily smash all systems, because the world is so old and so big that everything has a tradition and everything is systematic, and rejecting all tradition is in the Futurist traditon, and smashing all systems is done systematically.) The very existence of those Weaselites disproves their entire point, because Ben Weasel is not a lone voice in the darkness speaking up against the oppressiveness monolith that he imagines to be whatever he considers 'the punk scene' today, if he really was then he wouldn't have that captive audience ready to lap up all of his tortured logic bullshit and spring up at any time in defence of him. On a broad conceptual level his criticisms have a place as a significant aspect of punk rock is recognising the failings of your own scene and puncturing dogma and preciousness with giggling bile (and there are plenty of great songs about it like Electro Hippies' Am I Punk Yet? or Propagandhi's Back to the Motor League, Turkish Techno's Meth Not Meat, Screeching Weasel's very own Slogans etc.), but Ben Weasel has stopped doing it in that sort of scattershot 'I don't know who's right but you're fucking wrong' entertainingly sarcastic way, he does it in a patronising 'I am right! WHY CAN'T EVERYONE BE MORE LIKE ME?' way. He may be an outsider in certain circles but it smacks of someone who's on top (boasting about his five figure show guarantees) applying downwards pressure rather than lone misfit doing it with upwards pressure which aways soils that sort of thing.

Would I go and see Ben Weasel live? Yes, but I'd put on a full-face helmet first! Boom. But, yeah, I would, but, despite the fact that I just wrote a billion fucking words about him, or who he appears to me to be, it's not about him. Yes, the fact of who he is, what he's like, has led him to not only this unenjoyable impasse with reality but to document feelings and sensations that I fucking hated having but were entirely grateful for having elucidated by someone to prove I wasn't insane and alone, but the songs birthed from his creative loins still do exist without him, and will continue to exist without him, outside of him, whatever Republican politician he brags of voting for, and I love love love a lot of those songs, as much as I love any work of art in the world, and, as I think I have gone on about before, the communal experience of a song is what finally completes it. Yeah, I identify with art made by arseholes, but so do others, and they're gonna be arseholes of the same sort as me, and I want to scream those words with them, whoever the fuck's on stage. If I could go see a Screeching Weasel cover band which I knew would have as many people in the crowd as the real Screeching Weasel and that the crowd would be as completely into it were ol' Weasel there himself, then I would be just as happy with that. It's what I want to sing along to, not who I want to sing along to, just as I'm massively excited to see Ted Leo's Misfits cover band close out Friday night at Fest, almost as much as I would be if it were a Danzig fronted 'Fits (but less so than I would be were it The Misfats).

So basically, this article has been knocking around in draft form for about 4 or 5 months and soon Screeching Weasel are releasing a new EP, The Carnival of Schadenfreude, with a regular band, this would be a celebratory post of their power to inspire and my love for them, their dogged determination to exist in some form, rather than what this is, which is a sort of a complicated mealy-mouthed shrug. Now, maybe he'll snap back again, maybe he'll drag himself down from his perch and make great music again someday, but not today (or it doesn't sound like it from what I've heard of the new EP) but shit, I'm not gonna renounce my love for Screeching Weasel. Yeah, there have been times throughout this year where I've felt like I was moving past them, leaving them behind, few weeks ago I put on my personal Weaselmaniacal Greatest Hits playlist for the first time in a while and every single song hit me just like it used to, from the goofiness of Joanie Loves Johnny to the profundity of What We Hate. So I come not to bury Screeching Weasel, but to praise them. As the spiderhead psychopomp Tim Timebomb might say, "Dis isn a stowaree bout how Ben went doowaarn, is abowt how he wen uuerp." I just first wanted to indulge in some bullshit armchair psychoanalysis on the hard-to-love cunt behind the music to help maybe illuminate all the stuff I'm gonna say in what I'm about to do, which is a series of posts detailing my 50 favourite Screeching Weasel songs. Yep, 50. There are not many bands where I even have that many songs (there are plenty of my favourite bands that don't even have that many songs.) I probably won't get it all finished for a while, they'll be posts on other subjects in between and I'm off to Fest on Wednesday for a couple weeks of American dreams but 50 songs, 50 scratches on my souls, is what I'm gonna do, because in all the shit about Ben Weasel's personal conduct, there have been people laughing and sneering about how they were always a terrible band and they don't know how anyone could ever really care about who Ben Weasel is anyway.

And fuck that with a pitchfork meteor, because they were fantastic. Stay tuned for exactly why.

Mix Jones #3: Too Much Monkey Business

2011-08-20T03:30:00.004+01:00

I actually made this mix a while ago and couldn’t think of some decent cover art for it. Fortunately, the other day I saw the surprisingly good Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which fairly closely mirrors the plot of Groovie Ghoulies’ Outbreak. I also probably could’ve filled this with far more songs about how businessmen wear monkey suits but I cut NOFX’s Pimps and Hookers and The King Blues’ Chimp in a 3-Piece Suit and just stuck to the one. So this is one for all our simian friends.

DOWNLOAD

Tracklisting:
01. The Dickies - You Drive Me Ape (You Big Gorilla)
02. Didjits - Monkey Suit
03. Screeching Weasel - Joanie Loves Johnny [Live]
04. Dead Milkmen - Gorilla Girl
05. Groovie Ghoulies - Outbreak!
06. White Shit - Shitted Out
07. Spizzenergi - Jungle Fever
08. Osaka Popstar and the American Legends of Punk - Shaolin Monkeys
09. Tijuana Bibles - Gorilla Stomp
10. Arson Anthem - Primate Envy
11. Disgusteens - Monkey’s Uncle
12. The Mummies - (You Must Fight to Live) on the Planet of the Apes
13. Zombina and the Skeletones - Ape Man
14. Raooul - Rotten Dead Monkey
15. Rocket from the Crypt - Raped by Ape
16. Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments - Baboon’s Liver
17. Riverdales - Time of the Apes
18. The Mopes - You Look Like a Gorilla
19. Melt Banana - Monkey Man

Time: 49:34

For maximum enjoyment, turn the sound down on this video and let it sync itself to the music as you listen:

So Scratched into Our Souls #8: Oblivians - Bad Man

2011-08-20T02:12:00.007+01:00

I've been on a massive garage punk trip for the past month or so. The Rip Offs, The Gaza Strippers, The Didjits, The Mummies, New Bomb Turks and Guitar Wolf have dominated my computer speakers, but I think the song that I have listened to the most, certainly the one that has been scratched deepest into my soul is this Oblivians song.

It's a break-up song, and all break-up songs are country songs, ol' time country, when it was just the blues with a spark more twang. Whether you dress it up in the frenetic whine of pop-punk as so many do (The Ergs' Stinking of Whiskey Blues and The Zatopeks' Mary Lou are two songs by pop-punk bands that explicitly make this thematic debt clear) or shave the bedraggled edge off it in a plaintive folk-pop abomination. All break-up songs are country songs and all country songs, the ones I love anyway, are rough things, where the emotion is stunted and the pain comes through even more from the fact that it's being expressed by someone who doesn't know how to express their pain that much, is uncomfortable with coping mechanisms beyond bottles and barfights, that's what this song is. There's clearly a lot of emotion in it, but it's not always clear which emotion is being expressed and how the singer even feels about it or whether they've even made up their mind yet. You can't really say it wears its heart on it sleeve because its heart is a tricky misshapen muscle beating arrythmically and growling unintelligibly, ventricles at war with one another. This song fuzzes and spits with its own internal conflict, just like any human cunt does.

This song is, for want of a better word, a ballsy song. It's not some heartbroken cry designed to get girls to see how sensitive you are and offer you comfort, but it's not really a righteous fuck you of bitter indignation either with all the transparent pathetic bravado that those sort of songs contain (though there is a bit of that, it kicks it to pieces itself before you can snort at it). I think thematically the song it bares most resemblance to is the refreshing anti-sentimentality of Against Me!'s Cavalier Eternal, a fantastic break-up song that transcends many of the artistic clichés around this particular form.

Girl, I'm sorry but I'm leaving.
We're both at fault, we're both to blame.
And it wasn't the other men 'cause there were other women.
This just isn't love, it's just the remorse of a loss of a feeling.
Even if I stayed, it just wouldn't be the same.

But Cavalier Eternal is a wry smile for the most part, its emotion is couched in a self-awareness, it sets itself up and knocks itself down and takes the next step down the highway with its inner cheeks caught between its teeth, a cocked head, a wink at the road ahead and maybe a wistful blown kiss at the road behind that falls away into laughter. There's no such detachment in Bad Man, it does acknowledge the singer's own culpability in the situation being described just as Cavalier Eternal does but it has none of the acceptance of the situation that Gabel sings of, maybe it's a proto-Cavalier Eternal, cavalier foetal, the roiling mass of emotion that comes before the acceptance.

Over the scratchy stomp he howls in an overly-enunciated backyard Elvis style. I mentioned earlier that there is some bitter indignation, but for the most part it's a mixture of self-loathing and self-justification. I'm leaving. It's not you, it's me. I'm a prick. But by the way, it's you. "And it's on, and I'm gone. That's that." as Biggie would have it, but this guy has too much guilt to let himself out with a carefree farewell like that.

I love the way the song reveals itself like that, changing the direct of the emotion with each line but always emoting fucking hard, yelping and shouting. Just when you think you've got a handle on what's going on with the strained chorus of "I'm a baaaaaad man. I'm a baaaaaad man." it switches up on you again with "But I'm/too good for you."

Like Cavalier Eternal it's a song that ends on the road, but where Cavalier Eternal scuffs its heels knowingly Bad Man is an arsehole Orpheus, pulling out of the driveway in a beat-up car, punching the rearview mirror off lest it be tempted by the trap of a girl who's only fault was to love him and letting out a howl as it roars out of town. FUCK I HATE MYSELF. I'M A FUCKING SHIT. BUT. BUT. BUT. BUT I'M FUCKING FREE. WOOHOO!

It's basically Bruce Springsteen's The River if he never knocked the girl up and managed to force himself into Born to Run but without the girl by his side because she just represented too much of that town full of losers he was busting out of.

Time was in a vacuum, when I wanted to be free.
But now my adolescence has all but left me.
I could have stayed another day, but it would be wrong.
And you would just grow tired of me, before too long.

I say no. I must go.
I'm not the one you want, though I know you think so.
I'm a bad man.
I'm a bad man.
I'm a bad man.
But I'm
Too good for you
My Suzie, true.

Time was an obsession, but that was just for me.
You can tell by the sound of my shoes that I am gonna leave.
Even if you plead with me, and say you were so true.
It's too late for long goodbyes, honey, we are through.

The Holy (Jeans) Trinity

2011-08-19T19:26:00.007+01:00

So after a triumphant manifesto for how I would never give up the fight of excavating and sharing new music, I promptly found myself kinda burnt out on writing long pieces on how punk music is the best shit ever, and now with my triumphant return, I choose not to focus on some new brave one-chord wonders, but write some brief bollocks about possibly the three most famous punk bands in the history of ever. Great work, Joe!

I remember some years back, on a forum I was on, someone asked for advice on how to write a presentation for school on 'the history of punk rock' and this was followed by a flurry of music nerds (myself included) all scrambling to show off how much they knew about lineage of this bastard little musical form. New York Doll mentions were trumped by MC5s which were trumped by Stooges which were trumped by Velvet Undergrounds. People mentioned the stripped down rock and roll of Who tracks like My Generation. Early heavy metal was namedropped. Some people obviously swinging for the fences drew a think between the philosophy of punk rock and that of free jazz. It was chaos, until one clear thinker, one wise prophet whose name remains lost in the mists of time and my less than perfect memory, came into the thread and posted the words that I will never forget. "Fuck this noise," they said, "All you need are The Ramones, The Sex Pistols and The Clash."

And they were completely right.

So yes, yet again I am going to dance around that eternal question of "What is punk rock?" as if you weren't already bored of a thousand discussions of it, alright sick of me myself repeatedly saying "Yeah, it's kind of a stupid question and there's no real answer to it because what punk rock means to you is as personal as the pimples on your arse but I'm gonna try and answer it anyway."

Punk rock, in all its forms, can always trace something back to these three bands. That punk band you like, yes that one, think about it. Does it have right-on left wing lyrics? Does it play fast and loud? Does every member of the band seem constantly pissed-off at the world? If so, then it owes something to these three groups. Simply speaking: The Ramones defined the style of the music. They codified the fast, short, simple, aggressive rock songs. The Sex Pistols' essential attitude is the template for the fuck-you swagger of a lot of punk rockers, swearing on TV, generally looking like a tabloid writer's wet-dream of moral decay. The Clash politicised punk, gave it a purpose beyond the cheap shock tactics of swastikas and spit, channeled that energy into a progressive mold. Look at any punk band and you'll find at least one of the three, sound, soul and speeches. You're gonna get at least one, probably two, possibly three. (This is basically my FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED! idea traced all the way back)

Now this isn't all they did. The Clash also were one of the first bands (along with the Damned and The Jam) to move away from that rigid musical template and bring in other influences while retaining that essential punk energy, The Ramones also expanded their sound although to a lesser degree but are mainly unfairly recalled as stylistically monotonous and uncompromising. The Sex Pistols enshrined self-destruction in the punk toolset for good or ill, but right at the generally recognised year zero, the pissiness, politics and pure adrenaline noise are the most important foundation for all that follows.

So when people say "Where did punk come from?" and that scramble starts again, to equate it with the amphetamine thrill of the beats, the anti-authoritarian simplicity of Woody Guthrie, it's cool if you just wanna say "Fuck this noise. All you need to know is The Ramones, The Sex Pistols and The Clash." and from there you can go wherever you want.

Like I said, the the sound, soul and speeches, three different types of posturing, three different types of progress, all twisting round each other, interacting with kisses, bites, gunshots and frottage, linking in perfect and smooth and tearing apart with great fleshy rips. Kids angry, packed with snot, music fast, noisy grot and fuck you if you think if this is our lot.

Mix Jones #2: Wageslave to the Rhythm

2011-08-06T23:22:00.002+01:00

A mix for anyone struggling paycheque to paycheque.

DOWNLOAD

Tracklisting:
1. NOFX - Go to Work Wasted
2. The Ramones - The Job That Ate My Brain
3. Cock Sparrer - Working
4. Against Me! - What We Worked For
5. Off With Their Heads - Die Today
6. Teenage Bottlerocket - Bloodbath at Burger King
7. Jello Biafra and Mojo Nixon and the Toadliquors - Hamlet Chicken Plant Disaster8. The Vindictives - Assembly Line
9. The World/Inferno Friendship Society - Canonize Philip K. Dick, OK?
10. Dear Landlord - Begging for Tips
11. The Clash - Career Opportunities
12. The Blank Fight - John Henry
13. Patti Smith - Piss Factory
14. The Queers - Born to Do Dishes
15. MDC - I Hate Work
16. Mischief Brew - The Lowly Carpenter
17. The Showcase Showdown - Rip ‘Em Off
18. Hard Skin - Stop Working
19. Billy Bragg - Between the Wars
20. Oblivion - Day Job
21. Dead Kennedys - Take This Job and Shove It
22. Chixdiggit! - Quit Your Job

So Scratched Into Our Souls #7: Los Olvidados - Something New

2011-07-16T23:48:00.007+01:00

"I just want to hear something I haven't heard before" - John Peel

I recognise the irony of using a song which is 30-odd years old to make a plea for inventiveness and freshness, so there's that.

This Los Olvidados track is an early 80s skatepunk number mainly about the restlessness of youth. That essential drive for something better, at one level it's an already thwarted cry for the greener grass on the other side, the smoother pavements, the pools you never get kicked out of, but more than that it's about getting the feeling that's you've been sold a false bill of goods but twisting that frustration and betrayal into a driving force for change, more than "Do they owe us a living?" or even "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" it's (until the very end) a positive take on those lamentations. It's a push for a place to find yourself, escape, a break with tradition, away from "I just got a job/Not feeling too alive/It's like working in a funeral home/Everyone has died". The central cry of "I'm just looking for something new!" builds and build until it's screamed so loud it warps and snaps into "I got nothing new!"

Such is the permanent nature of teenage rebellion, the athanastic renewal of the longing for escape, for freedom, for relevance and meaning that cannot be comprehended by those who have defined relevance and meaning for the short blissfully ignorant life that is falling apart as self-awareness dawns like a fresh painful day; such is the drive for more than they have been handed, than they have been told they deserve or should aspire to; such is the fuck you; such is the belief, strong and pure and still childlike in its strength and purity, that life can be different, better somehow; such is the sense that something is being lost and slipping through their fingers every day that they do not scream at the night, every day that they waste following the paths laid down for them by progenitors who will never ever understand, never ever. Such is life, in all its intricacies and burning passion, with souls fired at the heavens like AK47 oblations from street corners and bedrooms, from clubs and park benches with bottles of liquor, cheap shitty weed, patchwork ideals and hate, love so tight it constricts the arteries and needs stents of beer and bullshit and punching walls to keep them open. Such is life, as it remains, beautiful and collapsing in on itself like waves throwing themselves at the beach determined to soak one grain of sand that has not yet been wetted. The youth revolt, the revolutions spin, the heads and hearts and fingers of a billion strong pour aimlessly and beautifully at the sky and earth. The sky splits. The earth cracks. Then it heals and the scars fade, but there’s still a story to them.

That's the long of it, the short of it is that I latch on to that desire for newness, the climb before the fall, and always kind of relate it more to my approach to music than any wider sweep of revolving life.

In a fuckload of places I have seen this image surrounded by righteous cries of 'Yeah!'.

And fuck that.

Fuck that not because I like dubstep, I only have a vague idea of what it is, or dislike punk (chief creative and moral force to my existence, yo). Fuck that because no genre is inherently better than any other (FUCK ROCKISM!), and as soon as you dismiss something new as shit and immature and noisy, you’re stepping into the exact role that punk is on many levels a reaction against. Whatever you think of the music in itself, any art that speaks to people because it’s being made by people like them is vital and exciting, the same way punk rock was in its initial blast of popularity and the same way it persists today in its own underground sphere. When British students and kids occupied Parliament Square in December in protest against the prohibitive raise in tuition fees, they weren’t playing punk rock but there was a portable soundsystem blasting out dubstep and grime, they were dancing wildly to a pounding beat produced by their own peers and heroes that nobody else really gives a shit about as they're trapped in the cold a couple hundred yards away from the seat of the country’s power while hordes of riot police stand all around you. And tell me that's not fucking punk rock.

John Peel was a fucking amazing man. One of the few people I'd regard as a hero. I will never approach anything like the beautiful anarchic spirit he had with music because I am fairly locked into one scene, one genre and culture, but he brooked no such bonds. Most cultural figures have a moment of relevance and then fade away looking lustfully back at their glory days, think Chubby Checker producing inumerable twists on The Twist (Let's Twist Again!, Twistin USA, Slow Twistin, Yo Twist!). John Peel remained relevant and brilliant for decades by constantly searching for that something special, the feeling of g, he pioneered, punk, ska, reggae, post-punk, rap, grunge and dozens of smaller and weirder subgenres. He was a man who would play grindcore on the biggest radio station in the country. (An oft-repeated story is of him getting forced to cover for a mid-afternoon DJ and on receiving complaints about the dismissive tone he adopted for the pop pap he had to play responded by playing a Bolt Thrower record during drivetime.) He also was the first person to play dubstep on the radio, and if he was around today I'm sure he'd be playing a bunch of stuff that wouldn't be picked up on by most people until a few years from now.

So while I'm stuck fast into punk rock, attached limpet-like to its crusty stinking heart, I'll always try and bring his restlessness to the way I listen to music, because cultural calcification is the fucking enemy to me. I'm on the look out for new bands and new albums, old bands and old albums that I missed on my last sweep around, and I know that if I look hard enough then I'll find it. I know that somewhere in the world there is a bedroom with a kid thrashing about badly on their guitar who in 6 months or 6 years can produce something amazing and beautiful and silly that'll make me feel the good parts of sixteen again, but I've got to keep looking for it, I can't let it just come to me because it fucking won't. Every year brings new pleasures. Every year brings new sounds, new punks, and I always want to be on board for that something new, clawing forward in bursts like a breaking wave. Maybe I'll slip out at some point, just get tired or bored or just too old to get the slashing new thing, but I'm gonna try my hardest not to dismiss it out of hand, because fuck being that guy.

There are countless great punk bands. There always have been countless great punk bands. There always will be. Punk rock is in a constant state of renewal and reinvention. A hydra built on frustration and ineptitude and loathing and hope and love, both immutable and transitory, obsessed with sincerity and silliness, aping the Ramones, ripping apart The Germs, building up the Circle Jerks, shredding the Minutemen or Husker Du or The Dicks, leaping from Crimpshrine with a line wound tight in its heart and spit in its eye, screeching vindictive oblivion over riffs stolen from F.Y.P., throwing the best parts of The Clash into a huge giant clustering fuck of melody and power, poetry and bile and dumb fucking attitude. Punk rock is dying, dead, birthing, alive in every single 4-beat count-off and song sung like it was the last one. And the most interesting stuff to me will always be what’s going on right now because it’s fresh, fresh as a wound, and falling over itself because it doesn’t know where it’s going. It’s a van full of kids in the dark and there’s a show somewhere out there full of people who also know the words to Propagandhi songs. Despite all its forebears and all the tradition and shite it's aping and building from, it's the fresh unsteady rush of Something New.

"What emerged from reading Rose's book was the affirmation that every generation feels this way about its music, whether it's Grieg or Simon and Garfunkel or Girls Aloud. It's a feeling written down in the rings of our grain. And in the generations to come we'll still be singing along in the kitchen, and buying records while drunk, and leaping down the aisle, feet round our ears. It's a human condition, I think, to be always stumbling out of concert halls feeling as if we have been drugged, to be forever finding ourselves back on our front step, surprised we have not been run over." - Laura Barton

Guitar Wolf

2011-07-16T02:40:00.020+01:00

"The trend toward narcissistic flair has been responsible in large part for smiting rock with the superstar virus, which revolves around the substituting of attitudes and flamboyant trappings, into which the audience can project their fantasies, for the simple desire to make music, get loose, knock the folks out or get ‘em up dancin.’ It’s not enough just to do those things anymore; what you must do instead if you want success on any large scale is figure a way of getting yourself associated in the audience’s mind with their pieties and their sense of “community,” i.e., ram it home that you’re one of THEM; or, alternately, deck and bake yourself into an image configuration so blatant or outrageous that you become a culture myth." - Lester Bangs in the essay James Taylor Marked for Death from the absolutely essential collection Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

So I try not to quote Lester Bangs too much, and I fail all the time, because he's the sort of person that when I started reading them seriously I was already leaning towards something approaching their style and approach in my own writing (I feel the same way about Le Clezio and his cascading torrent of words echoing the noise of society) and so reading them was a mixture of "Holy fuck! This is amazing! I'm not alone or insane! Someone is doing exactly what I want to do and doing it brilliantly!" and "Ah shit. This is amazing but it means I'm completely unoriginal. Someone is doing exactly what I want to do and doing it brilliantly." It's even worse with Bangs than Le Clezio because Bangs is not only offering far better writing than me, he's also often writing about the same shit. He hangs heavy over everything I pen. He is, after all, the man credited with the term 'punk rock'. So I try not to quote him too much because he frequently renders any insight I have utterly pointless (like Bill Hicks I can only thank my lucky stars he died horrendously young and thus did not have time to supercede everything and anything I want to say about shit) but it's unavoidable here, because if anyone has taken the culture myth approach to rock music, it's fucking Guitar Wolf.

You know how I should really conduct this review? I should just put the words GUITAR WOLF in screen-filling size and animate it so it flashes black and yellow and everyone who gets it will be like "FUCK YEAH!" and everyone who doesn't can go die in an office.

GUITAR WOLF, MAN! FUCKING GUITAR WOLF! GUIIIIIITAR WOLF, BABY! ROCK AND ROLL! GUITAR! WOLF! WOLF! GUITAR! WUITAR! GOLF! J-J-J-J-JET GENERATION! GUITAR WOLF! GUITAR WOLF! 1-2-3-4! GUITAAAAAAAAAR WOOOOOOOOOOOOLF!

That right there is a pretty accurate summary of the state of my brain as I walked out of the Islington Academy last Friday having seen the most awesome (in its original meaning before dumb fucks like me and the rest of the internet dulled it through inane overuse) display of pure rock and roll that I have ever had the ungodly fortune to experience.

Okay, so sonically, Guitar Wolf are the bastard children of Joan Jett, Motorhead, The Ramones and Link Wray, although they're probably stylistically more monomaniacal than even Lemmy's 35 years of making songs that go dananananaNAH! and they certainly have none of the attempts at pop hits that the Ramones indulged in from time to time. They are ascetics to the religion of rock and roll. Aesthetically, they are the bastard children of Joan Jett, Motorhead, The Ramones and Link Wray. They are garage punk, with the volume and attitude cranked so far off the dial that they trample carelessly around the shadowly borderlands of noisecore. And they look fucking cool doing it.

Every single Guitar Wolf album sounds pretty much the same (okay, so I haven't picked up the new one yet and didn't have enough cash to the other night but I don't think it breaks any new ground), but that's what's so wonderful about them. "Every time you do it, you dig deeper" as Ross MacDonald said when critics accused him of writing and rewriting the same novel over and over again with his Lew Archer series. Guitar Wolf are digging deeper into this almost primal rock and roll. Their song titles are built from a compendium of rock cliches, Midnight Violence Rock'n Roll, Machine Gun Guitar, Kung Fu Ramone Culmination Tactic and Sex Napoleon but they do it with enough unwinking verve that you just want to believe in it all again, all the 'yeah baby's and '1-2-1-2-3-4's and guitar solos and drum flourishes. All that silly stuff. The best starting place is probably the album Jet Generation, generally considered to be the apotheosis of their sound, possibly because it is claimed to be the loudest album ever recorded. Matador records claim "When we sent the new GUITAR WOLF record to the mastering lab for inclusion in our recent in-store play sampler, the mastering engineer called back, mystified by the volume level on the CD-R. The levels exceeded the theoretical maximum possible on compact disk audio. In other words, JET GENERATION is the loudest CD in history." How fucking cool is that? If you don't think that is cool, then maybe we cannot be friends.

The other possible starting point for Guitar Wolf is not an album, but their b-movie Wild Zero. In which they fight zombies and UFOs and look so fucking slick. Senji, Billy and Toru AKA Guitar Wolf, Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf. Shooting shit, shouting "ROCK AND ROLL!", riding motorcycles with flames coming out the back, blowing shit up, delivering a stringent anti-transphobia message, rocking the fuck out, saving the world, somewhere between spirit animals and rock and roll superheroes.

So the band took the stage. First Bass Wolf (U.G. since the death of Billy a few years ago), then Drum Wolf, then Guitar Wolf himself. Here are some of the things that happened during the next hour and a half or so:

I've listened to almost everything they've done and they only played three songs I recognised, the opener UFO Romantics, Jet Generation and Link Wray's Rumble.

They did play something that resembled the Dead Kennedys' Police Truck though.

The guitar cable was fucked so the sound went out a couple of times but nobody appeared to notice (I didn't even notice this, I was informed by someone I was with after the gig).

They did every single rock and roll posture, pose and move that should've gone out of style 40 years ago but made every single one look unbearably fucking cool, especially the whole "hold your guitar like a rifle and spray bullets of rock into the crowd" one.

They were so completely into it from the very first moment that a couple of the guys we were with had popped out for a cigarette and when they came back in to see the band writhing about and playing guitar behind their heads they were like "Oh shit. This looks like the last song." when in fact it was the first song and the entire gig proceeded like that.

They barely ever stopped making noise, each glorious rock and roll cacophony would be drawn out into a stumbling wind-down but before they did the synchronised blunt rock and roll ending they'd pump it back up into another song without stopping.

Guitar Wolf dragged a guy out the crowd and gave him his guitar, which the guy clearly could not play but his thrashing around made no real difference to the sound being produced and it took a long time for Guitar Wolf to communicate to him in his limited English exactly which rock and roll moves he wanted him to do (it was basically like that scene from School of Rock where Jack Black teaches rock stance to the kids, but enveloped in huge colliding continents of noise), but it was still all deliriously entertaining.

Drum Wolf did the ol' James Dean 'look cool while combing your hair' thing while just playing the bass drum.

Bass Wolf had no G string, not even a tuning peg for one, lest he be tempted by the evils of something that clearly wimpy.

Guitar Wolf broke a string and the guitar techs tried to give him a new guitar but he was like "Fuck it. I can still thrash this one".

They did two encores, the first one really short, the second one after the PA had started playing music to signal the show was over but people were booing and chanting for more and I could see Bass Wolf arguing with the stage manager for one more. FIGHT THE POWER!

This one more went on for fucking ages as Guitar Wolf pulled a load of the crowd on stage to form a four tier human pyramid on stage which he climbed to the top of and bestrode like a powerchord pharaoh briefly before it collapsed.

After the show had finished, the house lights had come up and half the crowd had left, Guitar Wolf came back on stage just to pick up his shit but the people lingering about who'd just been rocked out of their mind cheered him and inspired by this he grabbed his unplugged guitar and with no mic or amp thrashed out a song in exactly the same sweat-shedding dramatic pose, grimacing as though being exorcised by the music, that he had adopted for much of the show when he was not thrashing about on the floor or leaning into the crowd, in almost COMPLETE FUCKING SILENCE while the audience stood and cheered "WOLF! WOLF! WOLF!" as though they could still hear the majestic racket that had just flayed them of their senses.

I know I'm forgetting some of the other delirious acts of rock and roll madness that took place, they may have been erased by the dark swirling mass of clamor and chaos that filled the room and got itself worked into the rustling fabric of my being. ROCK NOT LEST YE YOURSELF BE ROCKED!

Seeing them live changes the way you view the band, it makes you think even more than you ever did that they are actually rock and roll superheroes, but it also makes you stop thinking about individual songs as separate artifacts of that rock and roll. It makes you really understand why they're classed as noise-rock as much as they are garage-punk, because that constant onslaught of sound eats into you until silence feels utterly unnatural.

"The static’s like the sound of thinking. Not of any single person thinking, nor even a group thinking, collectively. It’s bigger than that, wider—and more direct. It’s like the sound of thought itself, its hum and rush. Each night, when Serge drops in on it, it recoils with a wail, then rolls back in crackling waves that carry him away, all rudderless, until his finger, nudging at the dial, can get some traction on it all, some sort of leeway. The first stretches are angry, plaintive, sad—and always mute. It’s not until, hunched over the potentiometer among fraying cords and soldered wires, his controlled breathing an extension of the frequency of air he’s riding on, he gets the first quiet clicks that words stat forming: first he jots down the signals as straight graphite lines, long ones and short ones, then, below these, he begins to transcribe curling letters, dim and grainy in the arc light of his desktop…" - Tom McCarthy, C

In contrast to Killer Dreamer and a lot of that sloppy garage-y pop-punk, where it does feel like a single perfect burst of mellifluous pop taken apart from the inside and also in contrast to something like Husker Du's New Day Rising where it often feels likes a song built hardy, smooth and true and then thrown screaming like a bag of cats into that sea of fuzz so it has to struggle and splutter to keep itself heard. It feels as if we're coming from the other side, delving into the dingy discord of the world, the latent thrum of the cosmos, pulling a brief harmonious moment out of the primordial clang. We're not talking taking a Chuck Berry song and filling it with the crackle of basement souls, not wrapping a sweet teenage love song in acidic folds of hiss, it's the molding the background noise of the planet and beyond into something you can scream along to, exposing the true rock and roll heart that lives inside the deafening rumble of rocketship lifting off, the faded roar of distant traffic and the static buzz of a thousand electro-magnetic signals degraded and spattering invisible against bodies and buildings, going further and further into the dancing soul of things, unearthing rock and roll as the sound of the tick of the universe until they're grasping the echo heard by Penzias and Wilson and shoving it into a Bo Diddley beat.

Near-pure noise music like Hanatarash is possibly the closest to this idea of bringing into the light the sound behind it all, amplifying that low-level echo of existence as one drawn out, stretched and mutilated rock and roll song, like that version of Justin Bieber's inane platitudinous sexless Baby slowed down 800% until attains an odd scraping beauty, we're looking at everything from the big bang on up until the heat death as a version of Overkill lasting aeons with a billion false endings, but Guitar Wolf are a step away from that, often live it seems as there is no structure to what's going on, like these adventurers and cosmonauts of the sonic void are aimlessly rolling around in the distortion and thrash, but then they'll grab onto a groove, snatch a drumbeat from infinity and shackle it, they're plucking guitar solos from the murk. "Because what they call passion actually is not some emotional energy, but just the friction between their souls and the outside world." as Stalker had it, or at a less wholly mythic level (it's a hierarchy of noise and Guitar Wolf are drawing both from the base big bang echo and the assorted descendant static that has followed and intermingled with it) it's something akin to GX Jupitter Larsen's noise novel Sometimes Never which starts with "Most thought the radio static was empty. They were quite wrong..." it says before 20 odd pages of phonetically rendered static, pages and pages of letters smashed together briefly asserting themselves into half-recognisable patterns that scamper away from your comprehension designed to be read out loud and make you like hissing/fizzing madman if you do it in public. Entering into this churning noise, they're bringing back melody and rhythm from the brink and passing it on to us as only true heroes can.

Because here's where the culture myth gets interesting, Guitar Wolf are not us. Jeff Rosenstock is. Lauren Measure is. Mikey Erg is. Biscuit Turner was. Even an exulted a figure as Mackaye or Rollins is still us. Still that ordinary person who does ordinary things, goes to the shop, stubs their toe, they just go out at night and play stunning angry beautiful music rather than relaxing with a boxset of Mork and Mindy, a cool Coors 16 ouncer or a Yukio Mishima novel.

But Guitar Wolf drag audience members on stage and hand them a guitar and then they're part of it, they've got the crowd cheering them on. One move and you're a rock god, Auxiliary Wolf, let me hear you howl. What Guitar Wolf do, and this is explicit in Wild Zero in which the main character is not the band but a fervent fan named Ace, is they make you a fucking sidekick to the madness. They draw you in. Like a Dr Who companion, or Willy DuWitt in Bucky O'Hare, or whatever lucky kid gets to visit the Justice League HQ this week and help save the day, you're just the odd little human drawn into this mission, this romantic excavation of sound with the tools of poses and postures and three-string basses, part of the crew even if your job is just to keep the radio on the right station, you're part of the myth, the Guitar Wolf gang. Get your jacket and sunglasses and point the axe at the nearest star, with the ache and groan of space-time behind us, there are rock and roll songs out there swirling between nebulae and black holes and it's our job to go and get them. We've all got a little overdrive and garage noise in our heads so let's use it, shape it, exploit it. Count us in Drum Wolf, we're along for the ride.

"Some religions say that the universe was started with a word, a song, a dance, a piece of music. The Listening Monks of the Ramtops have trained their hearing until they can tell the value of a playing card by listening to it, and have made it their task to listen intently to the subtle sounds of the universe to piece together, from the fossil echoes, the very first sounds.

There was certainly, they say, a very strange noise at the beginning of everything.

But the keenest ears (the ones who win most at poker), who listen to the frozen echoes in ammonites and amber, swear they can detect some tiny sounds before that.

It sounded, they say, like someone counting: One, Two, Three, Four.

The very best one, who listened to basalt, said he thought he could make out, very faintly, some numbers that came even earlier.

When they asked him what it was, he said: 'It sounds like One, Two.'" - Soul Music, Terry Pratchett

So Scratched Into Our Souls #6: Killer Dreamer - Black Metal Band

2011-07-12T20:59:00.014+01:00

"They have names like Igor, Meldorf, and Tor/Black metal is not like, is not exactly like Living Color/I kinda hope they move here, so I don't have to pay import prices/But I'm kinda fear them being near me, because, they're not nice!/I befriended them/Bye bye mom, it's now me and my black metal friends/I befriended them/Bye bye Franklin, it's now me and my black metal friends" - Atom and his Package, Me and My Black Metal Friends

A lot of my favourite music sounds a lot like this song. It's that sort of lo-fi scratchy pop-punk that draws a lot from FYP, Hickey (Hickey are the best band ever) and The Mummies. The first FYP releases are really rough stuff, but they undergo a process of refinement throughout their career until they're playing fairly straight pop-punk, but it doesn't feel like a band choosing to change their sound, but one learning to play their instruments as they continue, that they always wanted the slicker stuff but just couldn't manage it at first. Hickey (Hickey are the best band ever) were a sloppily experimental band who often sound as if they wanted to write a simple pop-punk song but got bored and wandered off. The Mummies sound like a Sounds of the Sixties station with the dial carelessly thrown halfway off into the mid-band static. All three bands share the fact that they sound like they've reached their own distinctive mix of structure and fuzziness through a seemingly accidental careless process. They always wanted to play something the kids could bop to, but they were the wrong sort of kids, so they could only play something the wrong sort of kids would bop to, the freaks and weirdos and corner lurkers learning life lessons from this cartel of fuck-ups, learning brevity doesn't mean simplicity and that simplicity doesn't mean smoothness, learning beauty comes in burning packages, learning that distortion is a cure-all and that the top forty and its mass-market pretty faces cannot croon a broken, confused heart in the way that these pissy fucks can when they pack all the anxiety into the songs so that they bubble over, they black-lung cackle and sting.

Garage bands, who don't wanna hear about what the rich are doing, don't wanna go to where the rich are going, soothsaying guttersnipes. There is that criticism of punk that it's people who can't play their instruments, but it leads to this lovely oddness and degraded glorious sound, the first wave of that is what David's Town was aping. On Westway to the World Paul Simonon talks about how the reggae feel of Guns of Brixton came from the fact that he'd grown up listening to reggae so when he tried to write a song, whatever he did naturally leant that way. In the cases I'm talking about here though, it's music leaning into the louder angrier stuff that gives its edge rather than punk being unable to escape another sound but leaving some of its threat and menace in the song that we see in Simonon's pissed-off reggae masterpiece. I'm talking happy accidents for unhappy people.

So all those bands playing rough approximations of a more refined sound (and those three were by no means some classic example of this, just three bands that I like a lot that I associate in my head with this phenomena), led to a lot of the bands I love today which all dance around that style, Stymie, Dude Jams, Fancy Pants and the Cellphones, The Bananas, The Credentials, Killer Dreamer, Shang-a-Lang, Sass Dragons, The Exploding Hearts, Future Virgins, The Measure (SA). It's the classical notion of a three minute pop song torn apart by feral children and put back together roughly by enthusiastic incompetents. A slick thing pushed loud enough for the cracks to appear and the churn and shit inside to shine through. All of these bands have different sounds and genealogies but they can all be described in this fashion, pop songs for malcontents and howlheads, a crumbling silly little ditty that stomps and thrashes in a sweet dumb fury, unstable material, brief half-lives that decay and rot and break things because they'll never be prom queen.

Killer Dreamer are the perfect example of this sort of thing and I chose Black Metal Band because it's my favourite song of theirs. A short punk stomp that fizzes and spits and dies nasty. It reminds me of my friend Graham's admission that he only formed a pop-punk band because he was not a good enough guitarist to be in a thrash metal band, and he ended up playing amazing low-fi scratchy pop-punk with Fancy Pants and the Cellphones that contains all the brevity and vim of The Undertones but is nowhere near fit for mass public consumption. Black Metal Band is a somewhat noisy song about being very noisy. It's a pop-punk song about a black metal band that sounds as if it's been infected with the pull of the violent evil sound it's describing and is transforming into it. The smooth skin of something easy and clear picked at relentlessly until it begins to itch and break apart. Musical dermatillomania. Still catchy and hummable but nothing near pop. Noisebursts you can shimmy to.

Plus, I just love the bit where the snotty garage yelp slips into a satanic growl to intone the song title. Form and content, mothers and fuckers!

Night Birds - Fresh Kills Vol. 1

2011-07-10T15:58:00.003+01:00

"I met a wave head-on as it broke and took the cold shock running. My feet kicked out behind me and I swam straight out for a quarter mile. There the kelp-beds stopped me, a tangled barrier of brown and yellow tubes and bulbs floating low in the water. I hated the touch of underwater life. I turned on my back and floated, looking up at the sky, nothing around me but cool clear Pacific, nothing in my eyes but long blue space. It was as close as I ever got to cleanliness and freedom, as far as I got from all the people. They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through mountains, cut down a thousand year of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn’t touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn’t be tainted. There was nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean couldn’t cure. Except there were too many Ararats, and I was no Noah. The sky was flat and empty and the water was chilling me. I swam to the kelp-bed and plunged down through it. It was cold and clammy like the bowels of fear. I came up gasping and sprinted to the shore with barracuda terror nipping at my heels." - Ross MacDonald, The Drowning Pool

I once read an article about Monty Python which posited as its main point the idea that while everyone cites Monty Python as an inspiration, it wasn't actually that directly influential for the things that are cited as revolutionary about it. Its formal innovations and deconstruction of the sketch show genre were so complete that no-one else could risk doing things like letting sketches bleed into one another without being accused of simply aping the Pythons and so if it did have influence on the many who cited it, then it was more in its general tone, its anarchy of spirit.

The same, for me, can be said of the Dead Kennedys. I think Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables is quite possibly the greatest punk album of all time, and everyone I know loves it, but you won't find much that sounds like it. You'll find dozens of bands trying to be The Clash or The Sex Pistols, hundreds trying to be The Ramones, thousands trying to be Hot Water Music or NOFX, but not many people seem to be reaching for a sound resembling DK. That's partly because they did not have one definitive sound, they were constantly shifting and experimenting with genres and sounds, but FFFRV is what you might call the 'classic' sound and there's just not that much that resembles it.

(Of course, they're not unique in bringing in surf influences to punk. The Ramones covered Surfin' Bird and later spawned their own gimmicky but fun hanging ten tribute band The Ramonetures and The Livingbrooks later took this early Beach Boys feel of some Ramones stuff a lot further. There are the eponymous Surf Punks who are actually kind of a precursor to the goofy careless genre-hopping sarcasm of The Dead Milkmen. A bunch of early skatepunk has the odd surfy song or cover (like JFA, despite their Yodaesque cry of 'Surf punks we're not!'), then you have the other side of surf bands drawing in punk influences, like rock and roll fighters The Tijuana Bibles, garage-surf trash women The Trashwomen or intergalactic travellers Man or Astroman? but none of these bands sound much like Fresh Fruit (though The Ramones are obviously a formative influence on it.) )

And then here come Night Birds with Fresh Kills Vol. 1 which is a collection of their previously released seven inches, and everyone who hears them goes "Wow, it's just like DK!" They're not solely drawing from DK though, they clearly have a bit of Adolescents in the way they underpin their choruses with lots of aaaaaaahs on the backing vocals. The mid-tempo darkness of Living in the Middle calls to mind something like the Drunk Injuns' Mental Holocaust and its naked desire to aurally paint the trudging threat of a mind slipping into itself. They seem to be dedicated to recreating the beachviolence noises of this particular branch of the early 80s punk sound I initially assumed that must've been a California band, but they're actually from New Jersey.

The combination of surf sounds into punk subverts it. In general, in surf-rock the sun, sand and sea all roll together into a friendly fun day out with wholesome smiling faces, white teeth, tanned skin. The whole odd little subgenre of beach party movies like Beach Party, Gidget, Bikini Beach and Muscle Beach Party. "Help save the youth of America/Help save them from themselves/Help save the sun-tanned surfer boys/And the California girls" as Billy Bragg sang. The addition of punk rock is a horror movie take on the genre, like The Horror of Party Beach, but extending that horror past just a guy in a dodgy suit preying on women in bikinis into a pervading sense of danger and loathing and psychosis that threatens to consume the world. This surf/punk melding paints the sun as a burning ball of oppressive heat burning your face, not a happy smiling greeting to the day, the sand as dirt, grit thrown in your eyes, the sea as malevolent energy personified, a place of drownings and shark attacks, breakers crashing down on your head. It drags the surfers out of the sea and into the city and then gets them fucked-up on pills, mugs them and leaves them wandering about the supermodernist nightmare of Los Angeles descending into madness, the joy of a Ventures or Volcanos song rippling round the edges of their mind until they're subsumed into the underclass of the city, spanging for changes and humming the Hawaii 5-0 tune into the cracks on the sidewalk like they're worm-charming for that wave to come wash it all away.

Night Birds are doing nothing new. They have songs about being in thrall to b-movies that echo the grindhouse cinephilia of the Misfits and The Lillingtons. They're writing first person serial killer songs. Surf-punk instrumentals. Paranoia and social detachment. Apocalyptic fantasies of mega-tsunamis. It's all been done before, but they're so tight and well-constructed that you really want to listen to it, and like I said, the fact that the sound they're mostly going for isn't actually one that was done that much, as familiar as it sounds.

Punk rock has this odd mixture of being associated with this mad lunge towards a dystopian brutalist future in a lot of its early iconography and the way it was drawn into the whole cyberpunk literary movement and its high-tech/low-life obsessions, but also in its classic sound and simple song structures it's defiantly retrograde a lot of the time. It's stripping down the virtuosity of classic rock, laughing at the archness of metal, kicking the shit out of the self-involved pomposity of prog screaming "THE ONLY THING THAT SHOULD BE PROGRESSIVE IN ROCK MUSIC IS POLITICS!" Night Birds are this sort of snotty manic musical necromancy, a perfect example of the desire for safety and security within a sound that is built of unsafeness and insecurity in its thrash and violence. The aping of a past sound which engages with it perfect sincerity and never lapses into gimmicky parody. This is just pure concise 80s hardcore style punk rock, and at a time where we're building Reagan statues in London, watching Thatcher in the cinema, rioting in the streets against the Tory cunts, what could be more perfect? I can't wait for the full-length.

So Scratched Into Our Souls #5: Turkish Techno - Meth Not Meat

2011-06-29T09:04:00.033+01:00

"Here is the great, explosive novel I promised you. Like our souls it is polyphonic; it is, at the same time, a lyric poem, an epic, an adventure novel, and a drama. I am the only man who has dared write such a masterpiece, and it will be my own hand that will destroy it, when the growing splendor of the world has equaled it with its own and rendered it superfluous. In spite of what the inhabitants of Goutville and Paralysis may say about it, this work of mine unfurls an immortal banner in the winds of glory, on the topmost peak of human thought; and my creator’s pride is well pleased. Don’t think of justifying it; watch it, rather, bounding and exploding like a well primed grenade over the shattered heads of our contemporaries, then dance, whirling in a warlike reel, splashing about in the quagmire of their imbecility, taking no heed of their monotonous driveling." - F.T. Marinetti in the preface to Mafarka the Futurist, swinging like an eleven foot penis not just for the fences but the nebulous bonds of human creation itself. An utter fascist shit, it should be mentioned, but you've got to kind of admire that level of bravado.

For the most part with this blog, I want to focus on shit that I love. There are many punk bands that I am mostly or wholly indifferent to, a few that I genuinely dislike and want either scorched from the earth or just given a really good talking to that tells them to buck their ideas up, sunshine, but I don't really see the point of focusing on them too much, because unless you're actually getting paid to review something, or someone requests it, or they are part of a larger review (Bad Ideas) then purposely seeking out something you're not into rather than attempting to highlight a few small parts of the endless reams of beautiful brilliant stuff just seems kind of fucking stupid.

All I really want to do with my life is write about punk rock in as eloquent and inspiring a fashion as someone like John Berger writes about art and resistance, in as chaotic and beautiful fashion as Dambudzo Marechera writes about love and rebellion. I want to be as angry and funny as Bill Hicks, to be as fearless as Kathy Acker as she tears down and reconstitutes culture and literature for her own playful angry ends, as noisy as JMG Le Clezio, as fun as William Burroughs, as conscious as Ursula Le Guin, as moving as Bao Ninh, as readable as Ross Macdonald, as thrilling as William Gibson, as human as Flannery O'Connor, as punk as Aaron Cometbus, as conscious as Juan Goytisolo, as self-aware as Stewart Lee, and really to just rip off Lester Bangs for the most part, and I expect to spend my life in a constant struggle to get even a quarter of the way towards those ideals, or the strengths of dozens of other writers that I idolise, but that's what I'm aching and reaching for. (Also, I want to egregiously mention lots of writers so people know how smart I am, and then acknowledge what I'm doing as if that in anyway alleviates the shuddering arrogance of it all, like a cunt.) I want to do all this shit not just in general, not in the abstract, but with specific regards to punk bloody rock, and these writers represent many many different approaches and styles and genres, but if there's a way I lean with my writing, a direction in which I make an active effort to synthesise them, it's as an attempt to scrabble away from my own natural cynicism.

While it is important to question and attack the negative aspects of punk rock and one of the many aspects I love about punk rock is the way it accepts and encourages self-criticism (I do not think all these recent articles about sexism would be as prevalent in metal) and I do want to fight to make the scene as accepting as it can be without compromising what I see as the essential parts of it, now what I see as an essential part may seem peripheral and alienating to others, but such is the nature of the music and culture. While I want to sing along to Back to the Motor League or Chickenshit Conformist and enact their angry slashing denunciations of the scene, but generally more than that I want to sing along to Ghost Mice singing Up the Punx or Against Me! remaking the world in a better image with Reinventing Axl Rose. I want to talk about the redemptive power of the music and culture more than I want to talk about the shittiness of the scene. I want to write narratives akin to Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and A.R. Flowers' De Mojo Blues and their common themes of dealing with traumatic events and experiences with a return to the values and traditions of a marginalised native culture. I don't have a native culture, for the most part, or maybe I just don't have one which I feel in any way connected to, as Nick Hornby wrote, there are few people as rootless as a middle-class white Englishman, all I have is what I have chosen to believe in, what I have not been able to help but love since it first got scratched into my soul, and so I will continue to emphasise all that I see as punk rock's contradictory strengths, its beautiful human powers a little bit more than I focus on its contradictory weaknesses, its painful human ugliness and if I do turn my gaze towards the flaws and nastiness of it, I want to fold them into its strengths as a sympathetic mirror of the stunning fascinating complexity of all that human effluvium and steam generally more than I want to engage in scathing condemnation. That may be a fucking cop out, but it's just how I see the world and seek to leave a skidmark on it.

But still, you know, I get fucking pissed off.

I think the whole idea of punk cred is kind of bullshit. The wonderful thing about punk rock is that it has no definitive texts, yes, there are many punk albums which I personally would consider essential, I recently attempted to compile a list of 'important' punk albums, not my favourites, or even ones I really like, but just a list of albums I consider influential in the sonic and social development of punk and its subgenres, I gave up on this when I realised that my brief primer had reached 125 albums and I had another 30 on the tip of my tongue. But even if I'd completed and posted the list I know people would've had a go at me for missing out some albums, including others, probably they would've mentioned some albums which they feel are undisputable punk rock classics that I would have never even heard of. There may be some sort of loose canon running from Fun House to Scrambles but still, there is not one album you can point at and say "This is all that punk rock can be.", you can only say "This is something, or some of the things that punk rock can be." because even an album that battles and struggles with itself, that contradicts itself in sound and message in an attempt to mirror the wider schisms within the genre and culture would miss out on the fact that many of the best punk albums are cohesive unified works.

There are no definitive texts, it may be a faith in some ways but it is not in any way a religion, this means that in many ways that all definitions of punk rock are equally valid, the idea of what punk rock is offered by a 15 year old just getting into it is as valid as mine, when I've spent about a decade now thinking about it and loving it, and yeah that gets frustrating for me sometimes, I do get annoyed. When my friend posts a picture online of him in a Dead Kennedys NAZI PUNKS FUCK OFF! shirt where you can only see the top half of the logo and has someone tell him off for being hateful or says "I hope you're being ironic with that shirt" I cannot help but howl to myself "IF YOU CANNOT IMMEDIATELY RECOGNISE SOMETHING AS OBVIOUSLY FUCKING ICONIC AS THE FUCKING NAZI FUCKING PUNKS FUCKING FUCK OFF LOGO THEN WHAT IN THE NAME OF JESUS CUNT FUCKING FUCKARSE ARE YOU EVEN DOING CLAIMING TO BE PUNK FUCKING ROCK IN ANY FUCKING WAY AT ALL YOU FUCKING FUCKING FUCK!?"

But still, those poor pathetic fools who have never let the cheshire-cat surfy menace of Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables or the brief goofy thrash of In God We Trust Inc or the apocalyptic driving thunderscapes of Frankenchrist run through them and work its witty wailing way into their heads still have a place in this culture, this scene. I wouldn't have it any other way because there's always the underlying suspicion possibly the definition of a snotty 15 year old is more valid than mine being as it is a culture born in the teenage maelstrom of frustration and isolation and what I seek to do is to preserve the rawness of passion and feeling that all art inspires at that age while trying to work towards a more measured clearer evocation of punk rock's varying appeals, but in the ever-shifting bounds of such an amorphous self-contradictory culture I find myself constantly revising and arguing with myself, struggling and dancing with conflicting ideas that seem to each represent some vaguely tangible notions of punkness (not Punk Ness, which is either an extensively-pierced Family Ness member with a Black Flag tattoo, or anything up to and including White Light, White Heat, White Trash, zing!). I believe things are far too complicated to say that because something is contradictory it is weak or invalid, to paraphrase Walt Whitman fairly tritely: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, punk rock is large, it contains multitudes."

But still, like I said, I get fucking pissed off.

And when I get pissed off, I listen to Turkish Techno's Meth Not Meat from their split with the always great Brokedowns on Traffic Street Records, a brilliant label of the sort where if I were rich I would just send them a big wad of cash and the note "SEND ME EVERYTHING YOU DO. I WANT IT ALL!" (this video cuts off the song by a couple seconds).

Meth Not Meat a brief scratchy pop-punk tune for all those times where you couldn't take the expansive view of things. It is a zero-compromise-fuck-all-yall-had-it-up-to-shittin-here shout. Even the aforementioned anti-scene rants offer some hope. Nazi Punks Fuck Off comes from a position of siding with one particular group of punks, the good ones, though a song called Non-Nazi Punks Have Some Delicious Biscuits would probably not have attained the same level of ubiquitous reproduction in its logo and lyrics on armbands and shirts and skin (BUT APPARENTLY NOT UBIQUITOUS ENOUGH FOR SOME FUCKERS). The protagonist of Back to the Motor League begins by listing what he does like before he descends into a laundry list of his punk pet peeves, he offers some awareness and direction towards the hard-rocking reconciliatory movement betwixt his "mouthed feet, eaten hats, teated bulls, amish phone-books, drunken brawls" and the wispy unattainability of perfection that too many fools passive-aggressively posture at lamely, broadly speaking, he has somewhere to go back to. Chickenshit Conformist has little nudges towards the light like "Change and caring are what's real" buried in amongst its laundry list declaiming all the dogshit hardcore formulas and other related ills of the punk scene.

Meth Not Meat has none of those nudges, none of those good points and people to take sides with. Fuck that positive noise. Redemption is a myth. Salvation is a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. I am pissed-off with being pissed-on by shitty little fucking pretentious fuck motherfuckers who seek to turn radical politics or noisy music into a fucking compe-fucking-tition, who like to exist in a inbred echo-chamber of punk rock rules and regulations and humourless policing of others through self-important self-satisfied grandstanding. WHO THINK THEY'RE FUCKING BETTER THAN ME. I am alone and everyone else is a ridiculous slimy shitehawk with an acoustic (FUCKING ACOUSTIC! IT'S LIKE BOB DYLAN NEVER FUCKING DIED!) guitar. Alienation as a point of order. Being a solitary prick in the face of massed pricks. There is not a single line in this song which is not filled with all the spit and itching fury of the moments when you feel yourself falling into the silly sucking black wound of the idea that, as Frank Turner sang on Love, Ire and Song, 'punk rock didn't live up to what I hoped it would be'. This song captures that moment so perfectly, a quick mid-tempo guitar intro, an odd little pop and then it tears into action and you're sneering and shouting along "TAKE ME FUCKING HOME! I REALLY WANNA GO! THIS BAND IS REALLY WEAK ANOTHER SHITHEAD FASHION SHOW!" You're in the restless fitful rhythm, the screaming pace of this all-encompassing feeling of loathing and bile, it quietens down in places, repeating the central refrain of "I don't want it. I don't need it" like a churning mumbling to yourself as you smolder in the corner of the terrible show. It also slows down a little for the solo, restrains itself slightly, draws back into itself briefly before projecting that bubbling rant out at the world again. "I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR WHITE BOY BLUES, YOUR SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT OR BAD TATTOOS! AND I DON'T GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOUR VEGAN SHOES!"

Now obviously this mentality is a temporary one, an unsustainable one, a pretty fucking stupid one (chances are a good proportion of those singing along have some fairly bad fucking tattoos), but it is a bright flash of an undeniable instinct, a cutting spark that cannot be overlooked in the way it flips through you and marks you with its pyrographic reminders of times when you just snapped (a couple songs which perfectly illustrates the unsustainabilty of it and the complex process of simmering down to a greater calmness and then taking your ability to create that energy and channeling it into love and dancing rather than spite would be Operation Ivy's Jaded and Dillinger Four's Doublewhiskeycokenoice, two bands whose albums were definitely on my list of essential ones). It's a renegade Marinettian blast of personal affirmation that is kind of fucking pointless in the long term and exists in some ways as a warning for people to maybe steer clear of being quite that utterly batshit and uncompromising in their self-assurance next time, whether its in the act of proclaiming yourself a genius or just the only sane person left standing.

Turkish Techno are at that exact same point that Dear Landlord were at a few years ago, a few seven inches out and a long-gestated album in the works (coming soon for the last fuck knows how long, but apparently genuinely coming soon from Dirtcult) which all those arseholes sad and deluded enough to believe that they know their shit (I totally know my shit) about punk rock are predicting will be perched atop many end-of-year lists. This confidence in a band with so little actual material out there similarly springs from one momentous song which makes pretty much everyone who hears it get totally and forever caught up in its 2 minute rush, the marriage of bouncy shouty noise into a breathless breakneck rant that squats resplendent within the anserine beating heart of punk rock. With Dear Landlord it was Three to the Beach, with Turkish Techno it's Meth Not Meat.

A funny thing though, about a song like this, is that it, like the songs that approach punk rock with the most happy-clappy inspiring loveliness, like the ones that travel from one to the other, is that it is contingent on the listener already being a punk. It will convert no-one. It's by the punx, for the punx, with the punx. The references will not make sense to those not already invested in the scene. Who else knows enough people who brag about their vegan shoes to get pissed off by it? Who else appreciates the determination of deciding not to burn your bridges despite fifteen fights and your six bucks up some promoter's nose? Who else can honestly say "Punk rock saved my life" and know that it's not a pose in any way, shape or form. The glorifying and the denigrating are twin sides of the same battered pick. One of the things out of the many many things in seemingly endless ever-expanding list of things that I love about punk rock, one of the contradictory things, is that it is a place which both shamelessly self-mythologises and ruthlessly self-excoriates and I think it needs both parts to survive, it needs to struggle between them, the clatter when they come together and snap apart, to move from one to the other and back again, to sit temporarily in either one until boredom sets in. For the most part with this blog, I want to focus on shit that I love, but sometimes I love being a shit.

So go fuck yourself, world. Go fuck yourself, Joe. And above all other things, before you get out of bed in the afternoon or pass out in the early ours, fuck the fucking punx.

"I don't want it, I sure as fuck don't need it..."

I Live Sweat doublepost: Comic books and dancing like a twat

2011-06-24T22:38:00.008+01:00

Both these posts are taken from things I've written for the excellent I Live Sweat where they cover comic books and actually important matters relating to punk rock, rather than just wittering on about half-forgotten songs by half-forgotten bands:

"There is no secret identity." - A review of Punk Rock and Trailer Parks by Derf

There’s a really good article by Charles Baxter in which he coins the term ‘Owl Criticism’, referring to the sort of critics that dislike a book for its content, rather than the way it deals with its content, the sort of people who might say “This book has an owl in it, and I don’t like owls.”

I definitely get annoyed with reviews of art that don’t engage with the topic, and then refuse to analyse the reasons for this failure to engage, but it works the other way too. There are things we’re going to like because they’re in a certain genre we enjoy, or because they deal with a certain subject we’re interested in. That’s great. The problem there is, when we come to talk about them, we have to look at whether we love them for their merits, or just the topic they cover. Punk Rock and Trailer Parks is like that. It’s a book I love, but I do wonder if there was ever a chance I could dislike a book where Joe Strummer and Lester Bangs get drunk and decide to slash the tires of Journey’s tour bus.

Punk Rock and Trailer Parks is a bildungsroman set in and around the punk scene of late ’70s. It’s written and illustrated by John “Derf” Backderf, also known for his weekly comic strip The City, and his short graphic memoir about the weird kid named Jeffrey Dahmer he was friends with at school.

This is, for the most part, the story of Otto, a Tolkien-quotin’, beach-party-movie-lovin’, extremely tall, nerd, who, thanks to a couple of younger classmates, is drawn into the Ohio punk boom of the late ’70s that flowered in the wake of Devo and The Pretenders. Otto is, at heart, a traumatised victim of constant bullying, and has invented a ridiculous ‘cool’ persona for himself called ‘The Baron’ to take him away from himself. At school he’s still ridiculed, but as he gets drawn into the punk scene, finding himself as a bartender at the local punk club, The Bank, and eventually as a singer in a local band, he starts to take on this mantle for real. But as he becomes immersed in the punk scene, he’s still a nerd at school, and him and his friends have to negotiate creepy teachers, idiot jocks, unattainable crushes, sketchy neighbours, alcoholic uncles, and all the awkward travails of adolescence.

Like the songs of Craig Finn, another Midwestern chronicler of punk rock and youth, PR&TP is concerned with the pseudonymous power in punk rock; the same power that means a middle-class son of a diplomat can become ‘Joe Strummer’, living embodiment of the rhythm guitar; an angry DC white kid named Henry can borrow the name of a mysterious sax legend, and then pour the same amount of feeling that the old jazzman put into his horn into thrashing hardcore anthems of alienation; a fat kid can store up the names he’s been called and choose to wear it as a proud definition, striding onto the stage, axe in hand, as Pig Champion; and in this story, a bullied masturbation-obsessed high-school band-geek can take on the hard-rocking super-tough alter ego of THE BARON and become king of the scene. This is the key theme of the book for me, teenage reinvention of self and how far it can take you, what it’s limitations are, and how it both liberates and traps you. Maybe the central message is actually a wholeheartedly corny ‘be yourself’ but it blurs the idea of what that self is, because it’s neither the superstar or the geek. There is no secret identity. It’s about establishing a sustainable synthesis between these two conflicting parts of yourself.

The journey of Otto is chronicled in a Forrest Gump style trip through the scene of the time; meeting Wendy O. Williams, hanging out on the The Ramones tour bus, shooting the shit with Stiv Bators. There’s one panel where two of his friends fail to realise that his car isn’t finished and almost fall through the floor of it, later on, to show how far he’s come, that panel is repeated but this time with Strummer and Bangs in the car on the aforementioned mission to stop the corporate rock and roll machine in its tracks.

The art has a blocky cartoony style to it that emphasises the adolescent awkwardness of the leads, and probably owes something to the exaggerated physical attributes of Robert Crumb’s work (although less interested in tits, though this is a book which has three teenage boys as the main characters, so inevitably that obsession crops up). I really like the way it deliberately distorts perspective to highlight the juxtaposition of certain people or objects and their relation to each other. It’s one of those places where you can point at comics and say, “Look, this is not just a film storyboard. This is something you cannot do as subtly or effectively in any other medium.” And I like books where you can do that, because if you can’t do that, then what was the point of making it a comic? There are also cool touches like the Ramones’ amps bouncing merrily in the air like the anthropomorphic NPCs in 3D platform games, and I love the way the lettering is drawn as an integral part of the art style, taking up large portions of the page when it’s shouted by one of the punk bands we see in action.

One minor criticism is that sometimes it falls foul of the show-don’t-tell rule, with regards to both the symbolism and themes, and just basic images. Some of the things people say are overly articulate. It works alright most of the time with The Baron as that’s his character, an eloquent commenter on all the craziness he’s caught up in, but it’s a technique that’s overused. Some things that happen are obvious enough that they don’t need to be expounded upon by the characters. The first time we see The Bank, we don’t need one of the characters to announce “An abandoned bank turned into a punk club!” We can see that. Not just simple descriptions either, sometimes the motivations of the characters and the symbolic moments should be left for the reader to work out for themselves. Steve Aylett said of his slipstream science-fiction Accomplice quartet: “Unlike real life, most Accomplicers are aware of and ridiculously articulate about their own delusions, but like real life, they don’t change.” Except Aylett used it deliberately to great comic effect. In Derf’s writing it sometimes comes across like a lack of faith in his own narrative ability, which he shouldn’t have, as it’s a great story he’s telling, and he tells it well for the vast majority of the book. It’s just that sometimes we don’t need to be told what’s inside someone’s head, or what we can see happening right on the page.

The end of the book does conform to the narrative of a lot of punk rock stories with a moral that suggests this is all just a phase. To risk Owl Criticism, I’m not a fan of that do to my own personal preference for seeing punk rock as a living breathing malleable entity, but I recognise that it really works with the story here. And it’s not a depressing ending, it perfectly captures the wry mixture of knowing melancholia and stomping triumph present in these life-altering moments in the same way as The Clash’s Death or Glory. There’s a sense that something has gone, but that something just as cool is about to creep over the horizon. This sense of loss is only amplified by the post-story final page which notes that pretty much every single one of the punk rock icons of the time featured in the book are sadly no longer with us. This book is a hymn to the transformative powers of punk rock, and a story of all the weirdos and outsiders finding a place for themselves, not just for the glorious moment when the music rushes through their veins, but how they have to fight to keep that feeling alive in the everyday grind of society.

“Every bad thing I have is acknowledged as worth it, because it led to this moment.” You can dance if you want to...

I have seen a lot of people recently criticising violent dancing in punk rock, as sexist, as ableist, or as just plain selfish. and most of the time, when people tell me something makes them uncomfortable, for whatever reason, I am okay with appreciating their perspective and stopping doing it, even if I don’t agree with their reasons, because I do have a lot of privileges and if I can attempt to eliminate and nullify them then it’s great, but not with this one. While I do try to understand other people’s perspectives I have real trouble imagining someone who hears music that is this energetic and loves it and doesn’t want to move to it. I can totally get someone who’s weirded out by touching strangers or by crowds like that, but surely that can’t be everyone. So I acknowledge that I’m not going to be able to comprehend everything, this is one time where I just don’t get the opposing point of view, so I’ll just say to them something along the lines of “Look, I have no idea why you would consider standing still to be an appropriate response to a band you like, but if that’s your thing then go for it.” This doesn’t mean that I am going to stop to notice people who are not dancing and attempt to fit in with the way they’re acting, and there’s an extremely important reason for that.

When I dance, in some crappy basement or the grimy back room of a pub, surrounded by a dozen or a hundred people dancing like that with me, I am not thinking about someone who’s not dancing, and why they may not be dancing. I’m not thinking of anything but the words in my throat and my unsteady footing. When I am dancing like that, in a really good pit, that is boisterous but not scary, that supports all the crowd-surfers and immediately picks up anyone who falls, that is as close as I get to a genuinely spiritual experience. The one time in my life where I feel the tickle of what might be described as a higher-consciousness. That is the moment where all the effort, and hurt, and stress, and love, all coalesces into a greater whole and just pours out of me and I grin like a moron. Every bad thing I have is acknowledged as worth it because it led to this moment. The dark only made this light seem brighter. Every good thing I have is present and screamed at the top of my voice. All the time spent working soul-sapping dead-end jobs, all the mistakes and shitty things I’ve done, all the frustration, all the lonely desolation I’ve ploughed through, all the hours spent listening to punk rock and scrutinising lyrics booklets as holy texts, they all seem completely worth it. When I’m dancing and singing, with other people dancing and singing, I no longer feel as if I’m some isolated fuck-up who’s toiling in obscurity, destined to live and die frustrated and alone; I feel like I am kin with a million isolated fuck-ups who all feel these things. I am feeling the music. And the music is in part born of pent-up rage, and pent-up loneliness and despair and all that shit streamed into these coruscating anthems. I will not abase that part of myself before anyone who just wants to stand there, no matter how valid or important the reason is that they want to do that. Maybe that’s selfish to an extent, but it’s not lazy or ill-considered, it’s that core part of me that makes me me. It’s the one stand I will always take, because in the dancing exists the little unshakable nugget of hope and self-evident truth that makes me barrel out of the show drenched in sweat and want to change the world, want to write books, want to play music that connects to some lonely 15 year old and save them the way I was saved, want to rip apart racism, and sexism, and homophobia, and all these shitty destructive prejudices, want to shock oppressive arseholes with wild situationist pranks, and blow minds with truth, and burn down entrenched class systems with a song in my heart and a glint in my eye. And I’m supposed to reel that in, to stifle that sensation because someone, whoever they are, whatever their sex or experiences, feels uncomfortable with it? Because someone wants to stand still and drink a beer and take a crappy blurry cellphone picture of the band and feels that this raucous and beautiful music is best appreciated by head nodding? Fuck that.

I’m not alone in this. It’d probably be really cliche to quote Emma Goldman right about now but it probably fits. As well as that Pat the Bunny line and guys talking feminism to get into girls’ pants and quoting Emma Goldman without bothering to dance. And I’d point to the sheer amount of people my age seduced into the punk scene and its progressive politics by Against Me!’s romantic glorious vision of crowds of likeminded people dancing like no-one’s watching with one fist in the air. This is a quote from a piece entitled My First Punk Show written by Brittany Walenta, a good friend of mine, about why she loves punk rock:

“In the pit, i realized that, outside of the pit, I was wearing a leash that I had never noticed because I had not tested its length. I discovered just how glorious it felt to be rude, violent, and drenched both in my sweat and the sweat of others. How cathartic it was to shout along to songs with no regard for how it sounds to other people. How completely primal and desexualizing it can be to fight a crowd of people to music.

And that night I was reluctant to wash the perfume, of cheap cigarettes, and lone star beer, and gallons of sweat, away in the shower. And the next day at school I wore my bruises and aching muscles as a badge of honor, because I knew I had found something so much more satisfying and thrilling than fluorescent lights and class rank and “funny” student run morning announcements. And for the first time i understood wanting to run away and join the circus.”

I want to just address a couple of specific points here, that a moshpit is sexist and/or ableist. I don’t think it’s sexist. To characterise the pit as purely an expression of testosterone is an incredibly limited gender-normative viewpoint that is effectively attempting to shame women into maintaining a quiet, reflective, stand-in-the-corner, coatrack, appreciation of the music when they might want to release all their stresses, and demonstrate all their love for this music, by dancing freely with a bunch of similarly stressed-out and wasted punks, like a scarecrow caught in the wind, just as a guy might want to sit at the back and watch the music in peace.

And as for ableism, I once saw a guy crowdsurfing in a wheelchair and it was a wonderful thing. I got the sense from everyone around me that there was this real joy at seeing someone do this, at realising that a disabled person is connecting with the music in exactly the same way that all us more able-bodied people were. Now maybe that’s patronising in a way, most able-bodied people don’t really have an exact idea of how hard it is to live with a physical disability, but we assume it must be pretty fucking hard at times and we do try to make allowances, though it’s just great to see someone just doing what the fuck they want regardless of what the expectations of them are. My girlfriend has been whacked in the face by a guy with no hand, and smacked in the shins by a guy in a motorised wheelchair in a circle pit, but when she related these stories to me it wasn’t like “What are those people doing there?” but again this sense of “How fucking awesome was it that people who might be constrained by their physical disabilities and also the social pressures to play up the victim card as a result of those physical disabilities are getting in the pit and enjoying it the way anyone can?” It was taking great joy in a reaffirmation of the powers of this thing we love and believe in, that it can lift up and free people who will often face a much tougher day-to-day struggle than most of us on the most basic level.

Real violence born of malevolence or carelessness is a terrible thing, but the fantasy of it, the concept of a constructive upward-striking violence that we are all a part of is a beautiful idea, and the pit offers that. I have been assaulted in the street more than once, not for quite some time but when I was 17 an amazing string of bad luck led to me being attacked three times in two days, the first two within 15 minutes of each other, by three completely unrelated groups of people for three different reasons. This led to me barely leaving the house for quite a while. It was tough and I hated myself for it (one of the big issues was that I thought that as a man I should’ve been able to defend myself), but I did get over this paranoia, and agoraphobia, and self-loathing, and one of the ways I got over it was by going to punk shows and moshing, getting into pits, filling myself with enough adrenaline that I didn’t care when I was hit in the face, I didn’t feel pain or terror, just concentration and exhilaration. At one Zatopeks show I fell over on the beer-slick floor and didn’t notice until two songs later that I had a significantly sized shard of glass sticking out of my hand which I ripped out with my teeth and carried on dancing. I’ve had a friend hit in the head with the lead singer’s guitar and he barely cared because he was dancing and because he was having fun, and yes, because there is an odd badge-of-pride to shrugging off pain and injury that some would characterise as a pointlessly macho exercise, but to me represents a physical aspect of that desire to pull in all one’s hurt, and to stream it into songs, and art, and the expression of dancing, mind over matter, rhythm over the chattering spikes of the world.

The pit is violent, but it’s not a violence aimed at anyone. (Also, let’s not pretend that non-dancers are inherently non-violent, we’ve all encountered the dickhead who throws punches at people dancing too close to them and their girlfriend. That happened to me personally at an Andrew Jackson Jihad show.) It is a communal physical and mental catharsis that should be, in its most perfect form, open to anyone who’s willing to stream all the love and passion they have for this music into a chaotic slamdance. Yes, some pits are overly violent and macho and that might annoy me, but it also pisses me off when nobody in a venue wants to respond to a beautiful piece of music by throwing themselves around with reckless abandon. I think ultimately there should always a place for both sitting and absorbing in peace and someone who wants to release all their stresses and demonstrate all their love for this music by dancing freely with a bunch of similarly stressed-out and wasted punks, like a scarecrow caught in the wind, but I always know which one I’m going to pick given an absolute choice. In a perfect pit, the kind I’ve been in a bunch of times, there’s always support for crowd-surfers or stage-divers, people actively attempting to hit people (or to molest people) rather than just bounce and shove are treated with utter contempt and disrespect, and nobody ever fails to stop dancing and immediately go to the aid of somebody who’s hit the floor, which is inevitably going to happen sometimes because of the expressive full-contact nature of the dancing, no matter how friendly the pit is.

What I am always extremely quick to oppose is anything that seeks to sanitise and simplify the culture that I love. That I have invested myself in for about 40% of my time on this planet now, and all its stupidity and sweetness, all its intelligent activism and hard-fought communal spaces, all its noise. That it is a place for everything from gleefully pissy songs to a sustained self-interrogation of privilege and prejudice present within the scene. That it accepts and encourages all these things on a local and global scale. That it’s got bands ranging sonically from Ghost Mice to Threatener, from the simplicity of Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue to the sprawling epics of Fucked Up. In scenes from everywhere from Japan to Alaska. It’s a place for something as fantastically juvenile as the Hickey/Voodoo Glow Split or the music of Splodgenessabounds as it is for more stridently political or serious material like Crass or Bikini Kill.

I reject the attempts to dull the sharp edge of punk rock, not just from the co-opting powers of mainstream culture, and their desire to remove the serious radical politics, and package rebellion as a hairstyle and a power chord, but from the uncompromising drive for homogeneity-as-equality eroding the fact that the beautiful (and terrible but ultimately essential) thing about people is that we’re all from different places, and all have our different ways of expressing ourselves, and comprehending the world, and fighting to make it the better world that we want. How can we invite and welcome people into the scene by taking away some of the verve, and romance, and noise, which makes it appeal to the sort of people who want to get into it? How can we make punk a threat again if we systematically purge all that is wild and carefree in its adherents? The idea that everyone has to cater wholly to one perspective by limiting the freedom of expression of everyone else, or that we need to institute equality by forcing people to give up anything that might offend or disturb anyone else is pretty much Stalinist. It is so absurd that it’s like a stereotypical right-wing caricature of a left-wing position. It’s the mentality that Kurt Vonnegut so perfectly satirised in Harrison Bergeron and the Sirens of Titan.

Why should I be forced to acknowledge, and kowtow to, the possible misinterpretation of my dancing, and compromise this essential part of my being in favour of people who are crowing that a moshpit is anti-inclusive, as they completely fail to make the same attempt to understand the possible appeal and ethos behind something they disagree with, as I have done repeatedly with positions that are not my own; who have not made a single concession to the idea that what me, and my friends, and dozens of strangers who are for this moment my very best friend, are doing is not alienating in it’s intent, or even alienating in it’s execution, if you’re willing to understand it, but is in fact motivated by a constructive and inclusive desire to create, for one of these perfect moments that can occur when a band full of people as confused, and shitty, and broken as we are play their hearts out and everybody’s tumbling around the mic, these glorious fucking moments of equality, and joy, and freedom, open to all who wish to engage in it. The notion that we should stop that, and turn around and look for guidance from people who by all outward attributes appear to just not give a shit about where they are, and who they’re with, and what they’re witnessing, is lazy and selfish and anti-intellectual on your part and I reject it totally. Me and my fellow dancers and our pitborn friendships are Kevin Bacon and you are John Lithgow. And no-one roots for Lithgow.

I have huge problems with this piece. Maryam Hassan has thankfully already pointed out the inherent irony in the phrase “Consideration for others is punk fucking rock.” used in it, but there are bigger problems than that:

“I’ve never moshed because if you shove me, I am going to want to fight you. Because wanting to fight you is the natural reaction to being shoved. Now, you can kick my ass, no doubt. I’m an old lady. But I’ll still try to fucking fight you. Because you don’t just fucking shove people. What the fuck?”

Isn’t that your issue more than it is anyone elses? Because when someone shoves me at a show, I can recognise when there is intended malice and when there is not. Wanting to fight someone is not an all-purpose natural reaction to someone shoving you, it’s a selfish arsehole reaction. You’re mistaking your own views for the absolute truth.

“You are selfish. You are a selfish asshole, just like every selfish asshole you have ever complained about in your life. You are THE selfish asshole at every show you attend.”

Indeed.

How is you saying that people shouldn’t dance, or that people should dance in a certain way (telling people at a punk show to learn to dance is like telling a punk band to learn their instruments, enthusiasm over technical ability is kind of the bloody point of the whole endeavour) less selfish than me and my friends wanting to dance and wanting to dance in the way that we love? “What about you and your desires trumps me and mine?”

I’ve been moved to apologise to bands after shows where people didn’t dance on behalf of the crowd and the scene, because it just seems disrespectful to these people, who have travelled hundreds, or thousands, of miles to play their hearts out, in a tiny room, for little to no money. Some things are incompatible, sometimes ideologies and philosophies will clatter and clang against each other, and there can be no compromise or diplomacy, and we just have to live with that. People who don’t want to dance have to accept people dancing and just stand a little further back, just as I have to reign in my exuberance and accept people not dancing at shows when there’s a crowd that doesn’t want to move even though it makes me feel massively uncomfortable and never fails to really make me feel like shit in the one place that can often lift me from my lowest moods. It’s an unbearably complex world, and often we have to acknowledge other people’s feelings and maybe cater to them if we realise that something means more to them than it does to us, but almost nothing means more to me than dancing. It is my line in the sand. NO PASARAN!

So Scratched into Our Souls #4: The Only Ones - Another Girl, Another Planet

2011-06-09T22:53:00.005+01:00

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." - Aldous Huxley

The first three songs in this series have been pretty inconsequential affairs in the wider scheme of things. A mid-80s Ramones album track, a horribly obscure early 90s classic rock pastiche and a mid-90s parody Oi! song, not the stuff that is going to find it's way onto a Rolling Stone list of any sort. But this song here is a genuine classic.

Everyone has one pop song which they feel is the greatest pop song of all time, be it Hey Ya! or Billie Jean, Tracks of my Tears or Good Vibrations, one of those incredible songs which you can't imagine could ever offend anyone, but are so filled with all that makes pop music great and vital that their untamed spirit lies exactly there, within their mass market appeal, their ability to make every single person feel like it's their song, the one that draws them up onto the dancefloor or pulls them away from whatever stresses and bullshit they have if it pops up on the radio. Times when everything went right for two to three minutes. For John Peel, this was Teenage Kicks. For me, it's a similar song, one born of the late 70s power-pop that smoothed down the snarl and clash of punk rock with beautifully catchy melodies while retaining its irresistible energy. I fucking hate when people talk about 'the best year for music' because it's just bullshit nostalgia, to refer to the great Peel once again: "People ask me, "what was the best year for music?" I always say, this year is the best year for music. Prior to that it was the previous year." but it's undeniable that this period produced a lot of amazing stuff in this really brilliant style, from The Undertones to The Buzzcocks to The Runaways to The Vapors to The Jam, and it's here where you can find the song that typifies all I love about pop music and all I love about rock and roll. For me, it's Another Girl, Another Planet by The Only Ones.

They used this song in Paul, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Seth Rogen's slightly underwhelming but still enjoyable enough UFO-nerd buddy-comedy, and it didn't work, because it's one of those songs that is so good that it just takes you out of the film and makes you think about the song. I just wanted to be able to sit in that massive room and have that song played through the huge sound system with no distractions.

Every single note is perfect, the way it starts with that little clicking washboard guitar riff before those bass tones and the spacey background warping builds into the guitar solo with its soaring melancholia like watching an injured bird you've nursed back to health skipping off and rising up into the sky, climbing into a dot. A couple quick slurred verses and then a second solo pulling even further upwards and out of the thermosphere until it's just wildly skipping about, roiling in itself, bouncing between asteroids and planets and further and further out into the berth of the stars themselves. This is a song in part about leaving the earth behind and all the tender regret and restless excitement you face as you forget where you came from and punch into the deep black yonder.

It would be an amazing song even without the heady drawl of the words, but the lyrics are just pop perfection. Space travel as a metaphor for drugs as a metaphor for love. Love as a metaphor for drugs as a metaphor for space travel. Drugs as a metaphor for love as a metaphor for space travel. Wanderlust and fatigue and transcendence in needles and stargazing and the arms of some other beautiful little fuck-up like you, all mashed up together. Smoky warmth then wispy loneliness. Pulling away and dragging down. Bouncing out into the universe like old radio waves, eroding as you go. Cold outside and burning up inside. A romantic vision of one defiant moment in one line, a terrifying crush of infinity in the next, the tug of addiction and the battle of withdrawal, apathy and death, then rebellion and anger, just all that good and scary shit.

This is a song of true longing, and filled with all the depth and pain and sucking human wounds that that languorously gorgeous word conjures up in your drug-love-and-star-fucked head, your heroin arms and kissed fingers, your endeavour ideas, your challenger heart. Fucking hell, the whole thing is just fucking beautiful and perfect and it makes me want to die. It makes me want to run about and swagger down the street with shivers in my pocket. It makes me cry. It makes me laugh. It reaches as deep and as far and burns as bright as the human sound ever can.

So Scratched Into Our Souls #3: Hard Skin - First Day Angry Song

2011-06-09T19:28:00.008+01:00

"STOP THINKING START DRINKING!" - Hard Skin, First Day Angry Song

A couple years ago I had the idea for an essay about pastiches that represent a perfect example of the thing they're pastiching, examples of art that embraced the self-awareness of post-modernism, but rejected the sniffiness of tone that can characterise works of that nature and embraced the silliness and honest joy of the things they were making. I had a big long list of these, and I can't remember all of them and I've lost the notebook they were in, but a few that I can remember include:

Dr Hook and the Medicine Show's Shel Silverstein penned Sylvia's Mother, a lovelorn teenage break-up song that highlights the absurdity of how seriously young love is taken by the people involved, but also works honestly as one of those teenage love songs because there is an honesty to the melodrama in those situations.
Alan Moore's Tom Strong, pulp comics which knew pulp comics were stupid a lot of the time, full of odd ape obsessions and laughable over-the-top villains, but still got the reader invested fully in the characters who stumbled into these battles with Nazi seductresses in flying machines and what-not. (Actually, pretty much everything Alan Moore has ever done.)
Warren Ellis' Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E., a massive silly celebration of the purity of comics where people get punched and then explode with its tongue set firmly in cheek.
Guitar Wolf. ROCK AND ROLLLLLLLLLLLL!
Hal Duncan's Escape From Hell!, a sacrilegious b-movie in 140 pages that had you cheering all the way.
Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius books, a sharp satire on the excesses of 60s counter-culture and also the ultimate avatar of its joyous reckless abandon.
Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, a really great detective novel where the narrator comments on how many detectives in detective novels get knocked unconscious as he gets knocked unconscious.
Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead.

I abandoned the essay, both because I was incredibly lazy, and I realised that this is such a dominant tone nowadays—a reaction against irony that retains the awareness of your situation that gave birth to the studied irony in the first place—that I was probably writing a book and I didn't have any argument beyond "Hey, look, this is a thing that happens" and that this wasn't a new phenomenon either, there are examples I mentioned just now from 35 years ago and I could probably dig up earlier ones pretty easily, maybe that scene in the classic film noir Rififi that comments on the chiaroscuro aesthetic and underworld obsessions of such films using a shadowplay and song in a club that all the characters visit. I'm sure it goes back much further. (Don Quixote?) But anyway, the point I'm getting to here is that this Hard Skin song I'm talking about falls neatly into that tradition, being as it is a parody Oi! song that is also a great fucking Oi! song.

People get really pissy about Oi! these days. When I asked a DJ at a punk rock night for some Cock Sparrer he said "We don't do Oi." and gave me a look like I'd just asked him if I could shit on his chest. This despite the fact he'd just played Off With Their Heads and they're basically just Cock Sparrer with the working class apolitical anger swapped for introspection and self-loathing.

**If you know what Oi! is and have a brief idea of its history, you can skip the whole next bit. Just press Ctrl+F and type in 'twattitude' and that'll quickly get you to round about the place I actually finally get around to discussing the song.**

I have talked before about the way punk rock borrows and appropriates parts of other styles and cultures that fit its aesthetic, The Clash seizing on bass-driven threat of ska and reggae, World/Inferno incorporating the swirling madness of cabaret and swing. What Oi! did was to take the speed and noise of punk rock and imbue it with the choral emetic that is a football ground terrace chant. It is a great thing to be among people singing the same song. Whether it's the away-end singalongs of "Who's the bastard in the black?" and "We only sing when we're fishing" on one side or Sham 69's "There's gonna be a borstal breakout!" and the Angelic Upstarts' "We're the kids on the street. We're the kids that you meet." on tother. Whatever you're singing, if it's en masse it's pretty thrilling.

See?

The other reason why people dislike Oi! include the supposed far-right tone to the music, because it was explicitly working class and this was a time when a number of working class youths were seduced by the vainglorious xenophobia of the National Front (see Shane Meadows' fine This is England which is set a year or two later but still applies). Oi! bands generally fit into a few categories.

Avowedly apolitical like Cock Sparrer. Watch Your Back sets out their philosophy perfectly: "Everybody's talking about revolution/Everybody's talking about smash the state/Sounds to me like the final solution/Right wing, left wing, full of hate" Concerned almost solely with the travails of working class youth and instilling pride in people stuck in shit jobs and on the dole. See also: The Cockney Rejects
Slightly political stuff like Sham 69. They do deal with the topic of politics now and then, but always from the perspective of a dumb kid stuck in a situation beyond his control. There's generally more pity than preaching. Sham 69 played Rock Against Racism. They were anti-cop (George Davies is Innocent), anti-war (Ulster is a song of sympathy for all young people caught up in the old old Troubles). Generally just concerned with the emotions and pursuits of bored, confused young people from the shabbier side of town, and this can lead them into political songs, but just as often will leave them singing "HURRY UP HARRY, WE'RE GOING DOWN THE PUB!" See also: Infa Riot, The Business, The 4-Skins.
Punk Pathetique like The Toy Dolls. Not quite Oi! A related genre. Goofy working class humour. An absolute refusal to take absolutely anything seriously. See also: Splodgenessabounds, The Notsensibles, The Macc Lads.
Left-wing Oi! like Angelic Upstarts. The Upstarts were redder than a fucking matador's hanky. See also: The Burial, The Oppressed.
Right-wing Oi! like Skrewdriver. Skrewdriver's first album was apolitical. Then Ian Stuart junked the rest of the band, hired new people, kept the name and started pumping out disgusting white power bullshit. Also slightly more centrist but still right wing bands like Combat 84 that also fucking suck. The whole RAC (Rock Against Communism, not the breakdown company) shite. Completely fucking stupid pricks who obviously never heeded the cry of "In the real 4th Reich you'd be the first to go" from DK's Nazi Punks Fuck Off and continued to espouse a morally and logically bent philosophy which was in fact aimed at capitalising on their localist insecurities and destroying everything they really loved. Utterly despicable bollocks. See also: a bunch of bands I have never bothered to learn the names of because fuck them. Fuck them.

So yeah, there was far-right Oi!, but it definitely wasn't in the majority, Oi!'s political spectrum covered all the laces of the rainbow,* the idea of its right-wing nature springs both from the often social conservative tendencies of the working class they represented (which always have been reinforced by the pandering and patronising centre-right tabloid rags) and the loudness of the right-wing motherfuckers (also focused upon by the lovely scaremongering tabloid rags), and additionally from the fact that the first big Oi! compilation was named Strength Thru Oi!, an unwitting pun on the Nazi slogan Strength Through Joy. Garry Bushell, the journalist behind the compilation, is not a Nazi. He is a fucking twat though, but there is no totalitarian intent or jackboot fetishism to his twattishness, it's just pure and unbridled smug twattidude like a big pint pot full of piss you're forced to drink every time he pops up on a clip show discussing the few seconds for which he was relevant.

Anyway, let's get to the song. Hard Skin, members of another great comedy punk band called Wat Tyler, put out this glorious fucking self-deprecating singalong. Taking the working class and ramping up the silliness until it's approaching Pathetique levels, but it doesn't really have any actual jokes, it just completely overdoes the straight-laced (black) simplistic approach to life as a series of dog races, pub binges and trips to the dole office with no wish to aim for broader horizons. It's stupid and apolitical, it glorifies drinking and pub-culture at the same time that it rips the piss out of it (The Zatopeks' The Boy Done Good does the same thing in a much more wry and subtler fashion, but fuck subtlety), it's a song which uses the word 'cunt' seventy-eight times. This is the chorus of First Day Angry Song:

"Spent all day in the fucking pub, cos I'm a cunt, a cunt, a cunt, a cunt, a cunt cunt. Pissed my giro up the wall, cos I'm a cunt, a cunt, a cunt, a cunt, a cunt cunt. Spent all day in the fucking pub, cos I'm a cunt, a cunt, a cunt, a cunt, a cunt cunt. Pissed my giro up the wall, cos I'm a cunt, a cunt, a cunt, a cunt, a cunt cunt."

This sort of casual profanity should be familiar to anyone who has spent significant time in a drinking establishment of the sort depicted here. Groups of (mostly) men turning the air so blue, everyone is a cunt, everyone is a wanker, all swearwords are simultaneous rueful descriptions of self, friendly reaffirmations of intimacy, a barrier against strangers and genuine threatening hate speech ready to be directed at anyone who threatens their self-satisfied camaraderie. You can call your friend a cunt but at the same time punch someone in the face if they call your friend a cunt, walking a myriad of complex social tightropes with each profanity dropped casually, each 'fuck' or 'prick' with its own little set of nuances, bellowed angrily at a football game on the TV, let slip smoothly in a laughing demand for a cheapskate friend to finally get a round in, growled menacingly through gritted teeth at the unfortunate sod who just spilt your pint and dozens of other uses sitting in a complex web between these ones. Hard Skin, who are as a parody Oi! band one-step in and one-step out of this mindset, get the idiocy of this steadfast narrow-mindedness, but also appreciate the homeliness of a local pub. They simultaneously use the word as a friendly self-deprecating nod at these idiosyncracies, the "Alright, I guess it's this cunt's round." as you get up to go to the bar, and as angry denunciation of the stupid fucking wastrel who blows all their benefits on beer and betting, the "YOU ARE A USELESS FUCKING CUNTSCRAPE!" bellowed at a drunken prick who's forgotten he was supposed to pay the gas bill. And both these conflicting usages are aimed both inwards and outwards, screaming "I'm a cunt!" at someone is probably just as threatening as screaming "You're a cunt!" at them. And that seems to me to be one of the major parts of punk rock, taking your flaws, acknowledging them, knowing that they're stupid but also knowing that they're a strong and essential part of yourself, using them as armour so you can spit in the face of the world as much as you use them as a platform to be angry at yourself, a weapon to dig and lever into all the chances you missed to pull yourself out of this comfortably depressing little mire.

Also, swearing is just fun. Anything which you're not allowed to do on TV is. Especially if, as I discussed earlier, you're doing it in unison with dozens or hundreds of other people. Now I'm gonna stop thinking and start drinking.

*Interesting factoid: Not sure how true this remains, but for a long time you showed your political affiliation as a skinhead by the colour of the laces on your Doc Martens. White = White Power. Red = Socialist/Communist. Black = Apolitical/trad. Pink = Gay. Something like that. There were more but I can't remember. EDIT: According to one of my knowledgable anti-Nazi friends, it's also a fascist fashion thing. Apparently if you're an acknowledged Nazi then red laces means you've spilt blood in the race war. What charming people.

Mix Jones #1: I'd Be Joey From Friends if He Was Always Drunk aka NO PARTIES! NO CASUALTIES!

2011-06-05T04:42:00.010+01:00

This is a compilation of punk songs about TV. This is what I came up with. I tried to avoid some of the really obvious ones as I made it as a response mix to the mix of my friend Ditty (who made the sweet fucking cover art you see above) and wanted to avoid any and all of the songs he used, I still let a few unavoidable tracks like the opener creep in though. At first I thought I might be struggling for tracks and then I remembered how all punk rockers are pathetic nerds who love singing about having crushes on characters in TV shows or pathetic nerds who love singing about how how all of TV is a mass market capitalist sedative forced by lizard scum upon a bovine audience of sofa tubers. I think I let it get away from me a bit. The first draft was 50-odd tracks long, so I did pretty well to get it down to this length. For a long while I opened with the Minutemen's Corona. Could've done with another five songs or so of trimming but fuck it, I need to go to bed.

I'd Be Joey From Friends If He Was Always Drunk

Tracklisting:
01. Choking Victim - 500 Channels
02. Fancy Pants and the Cellphones - Love Cruise
03. The Dickies - Banana Splits
04. Hextalls - Televisionary
05. Connie Dungs - Teenaged Punks on Talk Shows
06. Dead Milkmen - Born to Love Volcanoes
07. Screeching Weasel - 99
08. Neopunkz - If I Watch the TV
09. Butthole Surfers - TV Star
10. Teenage Gluesniffers - Immoreality Show
11. Good Clean Fun - A Healthy Dose of Reality Television
12. Knuckle-hed - Cable TV
13. Jake and the Stiffs - TV and My Baby
14. Plasmatics - Just Like on TV
15. Dead Kennedys - MTV Get Off The Air
16. Shorty Cat - TV Show
17. Oblivion - We Hate Reruns
18. Bomb the Music Industry! - Blow Your Brains Out Live on TV!!!
19. The Steinways - Everybody Loves Raymond
20. Spoonboy - Fireball (Or What I Learned From TV)
21. Golliwog - Commercial TV Sell Shop Show
22. The Capitalist Kids - Television is the Opium of the Dumbasses
23. Southside Stranglers - Too Much TV
24. The Toy Dolls - Alec's Gone
25. BBQ Chickens - Sesame Street Theme
26. Eddy Current Suppression Ring - Colour Television

Length: 1:01:51

So Scratched into Our Souls #2: Ramones - Love Kills

2011-05-28T19:34:00.013+01:00

The Ramones. I have a fair bit to say about them but I'm focusing on this particular song at the moment. Love Kills. It's off Animal Boy, which I always associate with Too Tough to Die, the album that preceded it, but was actually closer in time to Halfway to Sanity. Like all those 80s Ramones albums, it's not an entirely cohesive affair, but it has some great stuff on there. It's got Richie's finest hour in the angry swirling shout of Somebody Put Something in my Drink, my favourite Ramones song in My Brain is Hanging Upside Down, possibly their finest pure pop song in Something to Believe In, a classic simple Ramones number in Crummy Stuff, and this song, Love Kills, a Dee Dee sung ode to Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. Punk rock's very own star-crossed lovers.

When I was about 17/18, I was really anti-Sex Pistols. I was on a forum at the time and that was the dominant opinion of them there and I agreed with it, and not just from a desire to fit in. On this forum there would be a lot of polls about the best punk band ever, or the best punk album, or the best punk bassist, or the best punk song about domestic violence. That sort of timewasting Hornbyesque listmaking that is a fun way to find new bands and have good arguments about the differing scrappy slapped-together ideas of a canon, to immerse yourself in the scene and history and find your place within it. It's a pastime that I of course completely reject in my old age (Hickey, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, Dave Blood, The Toy Dolls' My Wife's a Psychopath or Chumbawamba's Stitch That). One of these polls was for the bottom eight punk bands, which came out as Crass, The Germs, Sex Pistols, Rancid, Pennywise, Anti-Flag, GG Allin and The Casualties. Some controversial choices there. Some glaring omissions. But who cares, it was what about 50-60 teenagers thought of the shape of shit about six years ago. The point is, in summing up the bands on the list, this is what I wrote at that time about the Pistols:

The Sex Pistols are often revered as the greatest punk band ever. Well if making crap music, having a murdering idiot junkie as a bass player and putting your 'shocking' image ahead of your music are measures of greatest then they are. The Sex Pistols are to blame for every idiot punk band talking about 'anarchy' and 'the antichrist' just because they sound cool. They're too blame for every idiot punk wearing stupid shirts for shock value. In the few years before they imploded with the bitterness and spite that comes with being a bunch of crap musicians who make it big due to having an extremely smart, manipulative manager they put forward the idea of punk as talentless, undeducated music that still lingers today.

I was not a fan, but I've mellowed. Just as someone who spent this period of their life obsessed with The Exploited and The Casualties who now rejects the sloganeering street-punk spit of their youth and embraces the more positive community activist aspects of the culture, I have softened my stance on the dumb shock games of this music and culture that I love. I like a few Sex Pistols songs. Pretty Vacant is fucking great. I've also come to accept the live fast, die young rock and roll tradition which I used to constantly fall in and out of love with because even though I thought a lot about dying young, I was acutely aware that a combination of rereading Catch-22 for the sixth time and fantasising hopelessly about a girl in English class I was too scared to talk to was in no way living fast. I would leave a geeky awkward corpse.

Lately I've seen a lot of people, mostly of the age I was when I penned that little rant, react in that fashion to Sid Vicious and his sad addict ilk, and I'm not going to say you can't feel that way, it'd be horrendously patronising to do so, but I'm gonna try and argue the other side. The side of people who didn't cheer as I did when they first read the Nothing Nice to Say strip 'Sid Vicious is So Punx' because someone totally got their distaste with him.

So I say this from a position of sympathy towards the Vicious-haters, but the fascination is pretty obvious. Sid and Nancy were dumb and pretty and fast kids who lost themselves in the old and slow way of the dulling gnawing of junk. No-one wants to be them, except maybe that brief moment as a 14 year old with morbid fascinations because you don’t have anyone to crush on and a conviction that there is nothing punker than Never Mind the Bollocks, no-one wants to be them, but everyone would die for a Ramones song written about them, and one sung by fucking Dee Dee no less. Another punk rock junkie growling glib Shakespearean allusions and deeply ironic handwringing anti-drug lines over the simplest of riffs. Because that’s one of the attractions of punk rock, the notion that if you invest yourself in the love, the cool, the look, in the self-destructive unsustainable chaotic mythos of the thing then you’ll get an anthem of your own, a eulogy penned by your own cultural heroes. There are dozens of punk songs dedicated to the weird acquaintances of punk bands, the arsehole friends and dumbass scene kings and queens, from The Bouncing Souls singing about Johnny X bound by only six strings to this world, to the seemingly endless selection of Less Than Jake’s oeuvre about people they’ve got drunk and shot the shit with. It’s like an infomercial, INVEST NOW AND YOU TOO CAN HAVE POP-CULTURE HISTORIANS AND PISSY PUNK NUMBERS PRESERVING YOU AS A SNEERING HERO, POURING OVER YOUR SHORT RAMBUNCTIOUS BEING, YOUR BREATHLESS STUPID PASSING THROUGH. Like I said, I’ve never really given much of a shit about the Pistols, whether it was Matlock or Vicious on the bass, and I never didn’t think that the outcome of Vicious and his girl was fucking horrendously pointless, but fuck, a Ramones song. To get a Ramones song, I’d do a lot of dumb shit.

In discussing this matter with my friend Tommy, we came upon an even simpler explanation for the appeal of Sid Vicious. Sid's cool because the Ramones wrote a song about him. The Ramones are cool because Motörhead wrote a song about them. Motörhead are cool because Motörhead wrote a song about them. Quod erat demonstrandum, punks and punkettes.

Culturcide - Tacky Souvenirs from a Pre-Revolutionary America

2011-05-23T15:42:00.006+01:00

"Oh, say can you see in the blinkless electron-gun eye of the mainstream media mirage that what we hail are the hallucinations of authority and progress and righteousness whose sweet and stern voices have captivated and conditioned millions of human creatures, stimulating in them a passive acceptance of technological disruption and destruction of environment, of history, of possibility of alternative ways of being? Whose seven stripes are broken swastikas, whose fifty stars are black holes sucking 200 million atomized existences into the daily routine of the human herd, of hamsters rolling the great wheels of death machine, squeaking at the shocks and nibbling the cheese and reciting and discussing and delighting in their shared programming history, in their stupid lives, in their cancers, their deaths, their TV shows, their jobs, their ignorance, their endless, pointless, forward creeping, their glorious, blithe nose-dive into their pay-check's pleasures, into an ecstatic emptiness: a glowing incinerator: a parking-lot full of business-men conspiring and colluding on the big lie, the big dream, the big nauseating screaming sweating nightmare of Business America/Consumer America/Corporate America/Media America/FASCIST AMERICA...." - Culturcide, Star-Spangled Banner

No-one likes feeling like their essential culture that they love and respect and have invested themselves in is being co-opted by forces who are just seeking to capitalise on the saleabilty of some trite simplication of germinal notions of otherness and rebellion contained within that culture and do so without any of the effort and alienation and history really required to understand those concepts and their pained births. I have read some incredibly angry diatribes on the idea of the 'hipster headdress'. I once stumbled across a discussion on the racist implications of the failure to explain the concepts of east-Asian wisdom in Hong Kong Phooey. Just yesterday I walked past an immaculately coiffured bro wearing a yellow and pink Never Mind the Bollocks t-shirt and though I was never particularly into the Pistols, it still sort of pissed me off a bit, but it's pretty much always been this way. How else could the proto-anarchist teachings of compassion espoused by Jesus Christ exist as a central tenet of the unashamedly capitalist authoritarian-right packed to the gills with hate preachers greasing the shadowy machinations of big-business motherfuckers.

They co-opt. We reclaim. They defang and sanitise. We remix, sample, recontextualise and subvert. With spraypaint and stencils, literary theory, rogue codes and a soldering gun. We take this fucker apart from the inside out and rebuild it in a distorted cubist rendition that fits our fragmented view of ourselves and our fucked-out, romantically fuzzed and slickly-shitted aesthetic. We find our icons in odd places. We change the meaning of words and symbols. Scrape them down to the etymological base or pull them out of their hateful past. Altering and dragging up the rough edges hidden by airbrushed perfection, ridiculing the robotic distortion of the flawed human form that is everpresent in the shiny mass media realm. Humanising the inhuman, both in bringing to light the sparks of beauty in the disgraced and in highlighting the ridiculous folly of pitch-perfect PR-managed pop stars and movie stars and politicians who march in meticulous rhythm under the shaming destructive banner of THIS IS HOW YOU SHOULD BE.

It's great to exist on a planet where Luther Blissett, a 1980s Watford striker who by any stretch of the imagination should be remembered solely in wistful pub discussions in centre sections of Hertfordshire, is known by most people as an anonymous anarchist icon. When you walk past a telephone box in Farringdon and notice someone has replaced the text reading TELEPHONE at the top of it with WRAP UP WARM and CALL YOUR MUM it gives you the sense we're living in a slightly nicer world. It's fun to laugh whenever we hear the name 'Santorum'. This happens, not just through collective and individual effort, but almost by happy accident nowadays. We live in a world where you can wake up one morning and find that the playful hands of history have turned a silly Bangles karaoke classic into a revolutionary call-to-arms. And I think to myself, what a wonderful world (in Joey Vindictive's voice).

This is the internet era. Memetic mutations are the norm. Culture jamming is the culture. Reappropriation is an appropriate response. How many jokes have you read in the last few days that have equated the sad death of a now mostly-past it 80s professional wrestling legend with the ridiculously overhyped moronic end-of-the-world ravings of some sad little cultists locked in their homes and even further locked in their denial and turned this coincidence into something that's both an honest celebration of a childhood icon and a bygone era and further gleeful gloating over the idiocy of blind moralistic ranting and taking apocalyptica seriously. This is how we do things. Situationism is the situation.

Culturcide are one the many many precursors to this rearrange-the-world-in-your-bedroom ethic which fills up the culture today, where we determinedly curate and defend what we love and the same time as we repurpose, mock and mutate what we hate. Except Culturcide don't really love a lot. Or anything here. Including the concept of love. Apart from the opener, their 1986 album Tacky Souvenirs of a Pre-Revolutionary America consists of pop songs with sloppily overdubbed scathing lyrics, radio reports and adverts cut in and bursts of industrial noise dotted about to spice up the proceedings.

Here is a selections of the messages I got from Tacky Souvenirs of a Pre-Revolutionary America: Love sucks. Heroes suck. The media sucks. Punk rockers suck. The music industry sucks. Corporations suck. Pathetic fanboys suck. Critics suck. New York sucks. LA sucks. Cops suck. Trite humanitarian platitudes from multi-millionaire rock stars really really fucking suck. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you. This is a screaming joke. A culture war where weapons are sharp. Pikes, maces and nerve gas and everyone is already wounded. This is a pitched battle on a fast-food forecourt. This is a riot. A fucking giggle.

The first song is an deadpan intonation of the speech at the top of the page over a wall of noise and the faint strains of the Star Spangled Banner in the background. It really reminds me of the opening and closing monologues of the Dead Kennedys' Plastic Surgery Disasters. The whole tone of this album is pretty similar to Jello's searing scattershot satirical tone, with less of the silly horror songs that DK used in I Kill Children and Funland at the Beach. Maybe Culturcide feel there is enough inherent disturbing horror in the song We Are the World without having to further establish their credentials as unflinching romeos to the void.

There are some shit artists parodied on here (Grand Funk's American Band is blown apart as Industrial Band). There are some great artists (Bowie and Springsteen). There are some things I just could not give a fuck about (Was there ever a band as bland as Huey Lewis and the News? And Ebony and Ivory, anyone? The song which I have an odd personal relationship with as having it sung at me and my girlfriend by a couple of pricks outside a bar but for most people is notable only for somehow being an even more vapid plea for racial equality than Blue Mink's Melting Pot and its hilariously misguided non-PC lyrics of "Curly latin kinkies, mix with yellow chinkies). But whatever the state of the song being parodied, everything is approached with the same juvenile sense of outrage and nihilistic philosophical certainty, the same kick of dizzy anger.

I like Bruce Springsteen a lot. I think at his best he's something approaching genius in the way he can synthesise all the human ache of the shortcomings of the American endeavour and the slippery moments when life coalesces into a flashing second of hope and warmth, where you sit behind the wheel of the car and can feel the whole world's blacktop under the tires, where you walk down the road with such a bounce in your step you're afraid to jump for the fear you'll take off for outer space, waving at airplanes and patting weather balloons on their flank as you pass them by. I think the lyric "We learned more from a three-minute record than we ever learned in school" on No Surrender is one of the quintessential rock and roll lines. I do like the way a bunch of current punk bands have taking the best parts of Springsteen's unashamedly romantic posturing and combined it with the drive of punk rock, I think the first three Gaslight Anthem releases are really great music, Senor and the Queen especially. Despite all this, I still fucking love it when Culturcide fill Dancing in the Dark with a load of extraneous feedback noise and sneer over the top of Bruce's earnest singing and big synth-lines: "We sit around gettin' older, listening to Bruce's new LP. Dig the glorification of our own passivitity. Cos on the streets of this town, everybody's given up the fight. You're hungry for entertainment, Let's play the new Springsteen album tonight!"

Wichita Lineman is a classic, but it's still thrilling to hear it as Houston Lawman, with a long news report about the use of 'throwdown guns' by the Houston PD and their tendency to plant weapons on unarmed suspects they got trigger-happy with. It does have a couple of bonus tracks from a Christmas single, which exist in the long tradition of bonus tracks that are kind of interesting but do fuck with the rhythm of the album which finished fucking strong on a cover of Chicago's Colour My World entitled Colour My World With Pigs which is the only song on the album that they just straight-up parody without any grinding clamor or silly voices thrown into the mix.

It's a heroically single-minded shrieking vision of a inexorable slide into beige despair and oppressive social order that paints the group as the sole inheritors of the tradition of intellectual and social validity. Or maybe as the fresh new lords of an ironclad renegade morality, without any precedence whatsoever. It's pretty fucking stupid. You know that there's no way they're not tainted too, that they're not as sucked in my the whole neon human quagmire as the lazy punks they excoriate on They Wish They All Could Be California Punks. You know they can't really consistently believe that love is just another form of control because that sort of nihilistic totality cannot sustain itself. But that's kind of the point, this album is not really supposed to offer solutions or effect a positive change, it's a SHIT OFF! like a clarion call. A teenage fuck-the-world without refuge. No 'Fuck the World, I'm Hanging Out With You', more like 'Fuck the world! I'm fucking the fucking world!', 'Fuck the world til it fucks you back! It's a shout of NO GODS BUT TRICKSTER GODS! NO MASTERS BUT YOU BETTER FUCKING MASTER YOUR DESTINY, MOTHERFUCKER! NO COMPROMISE!

This gives the album more of a fun feel than anything, which could be taken as undermining their own message, but really just gives a vision of that disgusting lonely arrogant second where you feel like you're the only person who gets it, who sees past the curtain. You know really that there are dozens of valid ways of looking at the world, but right now you want to call bullshit through a hundred megaphones strapped together. And there is a little bit of hope dug deep down in there, evident in the forward looking title and bits of They Aren't the World. It's a great artifact but not just that, much of its anger and sophomoric cynicism needs to be appreciated for how relevant it remains. It's not the smartest approach, but its a tentpole of blunt truth for us to circle, lean against and futz around with. It challenges us to build on the slogans. To develop our mockery into methods of resistance. And it's fucking illegal as anything. Fuck tha police!
Somehow we get by without ever learning, somehow no matter what the world keeps detourning.

Hounds - Demo

2011-05-21T00:00:00.008+01:00

So my friend Scott asked me to review his band's demo tape and I said yes, because journalistic integrity is apparently not even for journalists anymore. So here we go. This could be the end of a beautiful friendship. Scott is, unimaginatively, from Scotland. As such, he enjoys heart disease, depressing stories about homeless animals, horrendous sectarian violence and badly cut opiates (the rat poison gives it a 'right wee kick' apparently.)

The first song called Old Dog. Presumably named so in dedication to all Scottish women. Boom. Sorry, it's actually about Greyfriar's Bobby. Possibly. There might be some weird social contract in Scotland where all creative endeavours must be laced with the message "Our animals are more depressingly loyal than yours, you cunt." There is a song called Rainmachine, with the chorus "SHUT OFF THE RAIN MACHINE!" which speaking from my experience of Scotland, is actually called 'the sky' by most people, and Young Heart, Old Soul, about the battle between a proddie greasy spoon and a papist chippie. Probably not.

Alright, enough with the lame jokes. Let's get serious. There are lots of different little sounds stuck in here, like offal into a cow's stomach (that was the last one). There are bits of the spindly/shouty Latterman sound (which is becoming so popular we're going to have to come up with a proper name for it: Lattercore? Long Island pop-punk? Riot Grrrwl?), hardcore, mid-90s emo, punk rock and a few other things. There's a bunch of surprisingly acceptable straight heavy rock in Old Dog, for example. It doesn't always gel convincingly, but it's a first demo, so maybe that's to be expected. The transitions between sections of songs are a bit clumsy and stop-start sometimes and the solo at the end of Young Heart, Old Soul is a nice solo but the guitar tone on it doesn't really fit the song so it feels like it's sitting on top of the other music, rather than rolling with it.

The vocals are pleasingly strained and tortured, but not to the point where they're completely indecipherable. Though there is some confusion at times. I'm not sure if one particular line on Rainmachine is "I'm not journeying home", "I'm not jogging hard" or "I'm not Johnny Ramone". I don't have the lyrics at hand, so I can't really judge them on that, but they're yelled with enough conviction that I'm fairly sure it doesn't matter too much. I still enjoyed it.

I enjoyed these three songs. They're not completely fully formed, but it's promising, maybe sometimes they could do with sticking a bit longer with one of the really solid punk riffs they occasionally lock into, rather than jumping about quite so much, but that's really just my personal taste. If you like screamy mildly-gloomy punk rock that draws equally from three decades of punk rock, then this could be for you.

And at the end of Rainmachine we get a minute or so of noise and studio chatter, which consists of people screaming "FIGHT BACK!" at each other. If I wanted that, I could watch Scottish parliament videos on Youtube, thank you very much.

Hounds Demo available here

Direct Hit!

2011-05-16T12:58:00.054+01:00

"We must write the story of our own life, and play the soundtrack to it too! Our culture will die, nay, it is already on its deathbed because we do not invest our own life in it! We do not include ourselves in the history! We do not take the responsibility to make it into something we can truly call our own! Stand up and make your heroes proud! I need a rallying cry! A flag to unite us in our desperate struggle to stay true and stay together! Give me a slogan!!" - Aaron Cometbus, Double Duce

"FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!" - Direct Hit! (passim)

Direct Hit! was a band that I was planning on getting around to writing about sooner or later, because I absolutely fucking adore them, but the initial impetus for this post comes from reading a piece about Direct Hit! on some obscure punk rock blog (not quite as obscure as this one) which claimed that Direct Hit! had a motto and that motto was 'Get pumped!'. Which it is not. At first I made a short comment pointing out the problem, which was responded to with an attempt to burn me which is never a good idea as I'm kind of a sad fuck who has spent a lot of time on internet forums exclusively populated by witty arseholes, so I then I comprehensively took apart their response, pointed out that it raised further questions about his commitment to writing well about punk rock and tried to offer some helpful suggestions, all comments were then deleted and replaced with a comment about how they'd had to delete comments while setting up a strawman distortion of my argument to justify themselves, which I then responded to again clarifying my position and pointing out the problems with obliviously ignoring constructive criticism, after which they then deleted all comments and left the post commentless. Checking back, the author also deleted a comment I made on a completely unrelated post about bands altering their musical style which contained no criticism of anything and was just an honest attempt to engage with the points raised in the piece which explicitly asked for responses, but apparently was so tainted by my unappreciation of the fact that they are always right and not to be questioned that it had to go. Ah, the internet. We're really changing the world on here. Of course, I was more eloquent than that dry account of the exchange implies, and also much more of a sarcastic dick. Needless to say, I take the fact that I had my argument deleted as evidence that it was a truth too searing to be seen, like the Ark of the Covenant melting Nazi faces off, not that I'm just an overly sensitive idiot who got inordinately worked up on the internet in an unduly aggressive manner.

I would like to set the record straight here, Direct Hit! have a motto. Or a slogan. Or a maxim. Or an apothegm. Or whatever you want to call it. And it is not 'Get pumped!'. It is 'FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!' To which anyone reading this is going, "You got that fucking angry about someone missing out two measly words when describing a band. What the fuck is wrong with you?" There are a lot of things wrong with me, it was probably a mistake to immediately assume that someone was demonstrating a moralistic urge to sanitise that which I do not believe should sanitised rather than just an example of accidental bad writing ill-defended (Hanlon's razor and all that). Perhaps one of the things wrong with me is that I put far too much store in loud stupid fast songs generally so caught up in their own force that they don't have the stamina to reach 180 seconds, but I'm sticking with that flaw, because that's the one that always feels alright and makes all the other things wrong with me not matter if even for a moment.

EDITED TO ADD: I showed this whole piece the guy who wrote the original blog post that had annoyed me and while he did make a mistake, it was a completely accidental one, and it turns out I really wasn't clear enough in my first complaint so the whole thing was a genuine misunderstanding. So we are both now totally cool, united by the power of Direct Hit! and punk rock. I understand that these sorts of edits should probably go right at the end of an article, but I don't want to fuck with the rhythm of the piece too much (which is just getting into gear at this point, honestly) and I think it has a pretty nice build to a really good climax that would suffer from a corrective epilogue. And I bet you can't guess what that finale is.

See I like writing about punk rock, I like taking the thrill that it gives me and trying to examine it and recreate it apart from itself, but the problem is, I’m always elaborating on something that it sometimes seems you either feel instinctively or you don’t. I’m always trying to take apart something that is perfect in its own retrograde little way and then rebuild the essential tempest of the sweet combination of passion and intelligence expressed in rough music, strained voices and fuck-up pure lyrics using a few dry overused words and phrases scratched into a notebook or shimmering on a computer screen. I’m always trying to use 500 or 1000 or 10000 words to sum up a sentiment that is never expressed in a better way, in a truer fashion than the group vox choruses, than the simple riffs and pounding drumbeats, than four words screamed at the start of a punk rock song. A Direct Hit! punk rock song. Stupid as fuck and fun as dumb hell. I could witter on for ages about the juxtaposition of hate and love, the scrambling bedfellows of angry inspiration and scattershot expletives, the parallel emotional sparks of adolescent rebellion and brief teenage camaraderie, about how joy and a shining sliver of a greater meaning is demonstrated to the few ready to embrace it in songs about prison escapes, drunken escapades and being a werewolf, all I would ever really be saying would be:

FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!

There are a lot of punk rock slogans, mottos, maxims, aphorisms, axioms and apothegms. GABBA GABBA HEY! MORE CLIT IN THE PIT! REVENGE OF THE VILLAGE IDIOTS! TRUTH, ADVENTURE, LOVE AND RAGE! NEVER TRUST A HIPPY! KILL FROM THE HEART! PUNX IS HIPPIES! GET PISSED, DESTROY! PUNK IS DEAD, LONG LIVE PUNK! A.C.A.C! WE GOT THAT PMA! DIG THAT GROOVE BABY! SLIM JIM! PLEASE KILL ME! ONLY ANARCHISTS ARE PRETTY! FAGS HATE GOD! FUCK THE BORDER! 45 STORY HOUSE, 34 BRICKS! etc. and we shout all these phrases at each other as shibboleths and in-jokes, fall back on them when we're too wasted on cheap whiskey or by cheap jobs to construct an argument, to properly spend the time we need to fully elucidate our artistic and political positions, our angers and ideals and desires. We sew them into our clothes, into our fucking hearts. We also love these little lines so much because the complex parts of ourselves, the ideals and struggles and stands we're not sure we want to take, are in a constant state of flux, circling around inside ourselves, altering subtly, dulling or sharpening with our responses to day-to-day events. And often the only constant in these internal ruminations is a slogan sturdy like an island in the void, clear beeping signal in the noise. Something we can grasp on to and know that despite all the swirling confusion of our lives and our place in the universe, there is this one little thing that makes some sense. And in this case that little morsel of unerodable sanity is:

FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!

That Cometbus quote at the top of the page comes from Double Duce, the best punk rock novel ever written (I am planning a future post laying out the conventions of the punk rock novel as a distinct genre akin to the Latin American dictator novel). The quote comes from a section when the lead character gets pissed off with his friends just reciting old punk slogans and quotes and exhorts them to create their own. "Who knows what the hell 'Sten guns in Knightbridge' means?" he asks. We all want to make our own mark, take our own injokes forged in online discussions of Against Me! or The Thorns of Life, coined accidentally in drunken conversations in between the openers at shows in the backrooms of pubs, we want to take those quips and build them into the mythos of kids the world over shouting the words to Cock Sparrer songs in sweaty basements. I know I have a few lines that if I ever get my band properly together, are fit for singing along and sticking on t-shirts, pithy enough to go in a one-line message board signature or daub on a skateboard grip to distinguish the nose and tail, but until I get that sorted out, and even after that, it's fucking great to hear someone else come up with a new perfect slogan and to see it permeate the consciousness of punk rock. A chant for our age, our punk rock generation, to echo back alongside FIGHT WAR! NOT WARS! or PLAY FAST OR DIE! that will endure in patches and tattoos, a particular basic template for the music we love maybe more than we should. A particular stripped-down template along the lines of:

FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!

Warren Ellis wrote about writers "Deep down, there's a little James Joyce homunculus in our hearts, presumably chatting up a saucy-looking ventricle and asking it if it shags, and also spreading the beautifully toxic notion that his book Ulysses actually contains all of Dublin in it and, should it ever be destroyed, a new Dublin could be generated from it like a backup copy, if needs be. And so we peer around at everything, to see if we can image it on a hard drive of a book, ghosting the real world." I know I do that, I try and work out the little aspects of things so common they're usually left unseen and I try and structure them in my head so that they make a kind of pattern. When applied to punk rock, this deluded romantic idea that I can never really shake leads to me leaping at certain screwily dazzling lines which I feel manage to encapsulate something perfect and essential about the genre and culture I love and have invested myself so wholly in, where I feel like as if somehow if almost all evidence of the music and the movement surrounding it was destroyed you could extrapolate its whole, all its contradictions and shittiness and drama and fleeting perfection, from one great line, one statement of punk rock purpose, like the universe contained in a piece of fairy cake in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You could find the whole of punk rock in World/Inferno's chant of "Because I can, 'cause no one can stop me, 'cos it makes up for things I lost. Because I'm addicted to bad ideas and all the beauty in this world". Or The Ramones intoning "Everyone’s a secret nerd. Everyone’s a closet lame." on Mama's Boy. Or Mojo Nixon exclaiming "Let me tell you, real rock and roll’s about cheap electrical guitars and nasty secret places that serve underage kids in bars!" Or the very title of The Grit's I Came Out the Womb an Angry Cunt. D4's "In this frustration we find our salvation" (a lot of fucking D4 songs actually). Black Flag's Rise Above. Bomb the Music Industry!'s band name. The Buzzcocks repeating "Pretty girls, pretty boys, have you ever heard your mummy scream noise annoys?" Rivethead's eleven second blast of Sleepless in St. Paul roaring "I’m a fuck-up who fucks up, gets too drunk, won’t shut up. I’m hopeless, I know this. I shoplift. I’m homeless. I love you, it’s stupid, sounds sappy, it’s true but it could pass, might be that cheap speed makes me think fast." I could provide endless examples of this, because I'm a huge fucking nerd and I invest a lot of time in seeking out these little wonderful fragments of a larger broken, but amazingly broken, whole. I would argue semi-seriously that you can pretty much sum up the essential nature of punk rock and my love for it in FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED! The combination of excitement and snottiness, youthful enthusiasm and sneering petulance, profane noise and profound bliss. Romantic cynicism. That's why I felt aggrieved to the extent that I was willing to forcefully argue my corner when someone cut the slogan in half thinking it still meant the same thing. I think pretty much every great punk band has some part of that four word shout in its genetic make-up, and the punk bands that I dislike or just can't get into are generally ones that I feel have neither enough FUCK YOU! or GET PUMPED! to their being. Let's look at some examples:

The Velvet Underground: FUCK YOU!
The Stooges: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
MC5: GET PUMPED!
The New York Dolls: GET PUMPED!
The Dictators: FUCK YOU!
The Ramones: GET PUMPED!
The Sex Pistols: FUCK YOU!
The Clash: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
The Damned: FUCK YOU!
Stiff Little Fingers: FUCK YOU!
Cock Sparrer: GET PUMPED!
The Jam: GET PUMPED!
Sham 69: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
Crass: FUCK YOU!
Conflict: FUCK YOU!
Dead Kennedys: FUCK YOU!
The Germs: FUCK YOU!
Black Flag: FUCK YOU!
Minor Threat: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
The Toy Dolls: GET PUMPED!
The Anti-Nowhere League: FUCK YOU!
Bérurier Noir: FUCK YOU!
Bad Brains: GET PUMPED!
The Misfits: FUCK YOU!
Angry Samoans: FUCK YOU!
The Dicks: FUCK YOU!
The Big Boys: GET PUMPED!
Culturcide: FUCK YOU!
Hüsker Du: FUCK YOU!
The Minutemen: FUCK YOU!
The Replacements: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
Dayglo Abortions: FUCK YOU!
The Dead Milkmen: FUCK YOU!
Gorilla Biscuits: GET PUMPED!
The Queers: FUCK YOU!
The Mr T Experience: GET PUMPED!
Screeching Weasel: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
Jawbreaker: FUCK YOU!
Bikini Kill: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
NOFX: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
Rancid: GET PUMPED!
Good Clean Fun: GET PUMPED!
Off With Their Heads: FUCK YOU!
Bomb the Music Industry!: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
Hickey: FUCK YOU!
Bent Outta Shape: FUCK YOU!
The Copyrights: GET PUMPED!
The Vindictives: FUCK YOU!
The World/Inferno Friendship Society: GET PUMPED!
The Gateway District: GET PUMPED!
Dear Landlord: GET PUMPED!
The Bouncing Souls: GET PUMPED!
F.Y.P.: FUCK YOU!
Dillinger Four: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
Apocalypse Hoboken: FUCK YOU!
The Measure (SA): GET PUMPED!
Boris the Sprinkler: FUCK YOU!
The Dwarves: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
Used Kids: GET PUMPED!
Guitar Wolf: GET PUMPED!
Leftover Crack: FUCK YOU!
Operation Ivy: GET PUMPED!
Evan Greer: GET PUMPED!
Ghost Mice: GET PUMPED!
Against Me!: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
Johnny Hobo and the Freight-Trains: FUCK YOU!
Propagandhi: FUCK YOU!
Soophie Nun Squad: GET PUMPED!
Paintbox: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!
Fleshies: FUCK YOU!
Fancy Pants and the Cellphones: GET PUMPED!
Future Virgins: GET PUMPED!
Direct Hit!: FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED!

I could go on. Needless to say, these labels are not an exact science. Black Flag have a bunch of GET PUMPED! songs despite being a complete FUCK YOU! band most of the time. Bikini Kill are a FUCK YOU! band if you're an unthinking misogynist prick, a GET PUMPED! band if you're a rad progressive punk rocker smashing the patriarchy. The Dwarves started off as a pure FUCK YOU! band, but have incorporated a whole range of GET PUMPED! influences while retaining the essential FUCK YOU!itude. I could go on, and in fact I am sort of tempted to qualify every single one of my judgements above (maybe I should draw a graph!), but I will not, because I am not quite that crazy.

I realise now that I've spent the entire article thus-far talking about the first three seconds of Direct Hit!'s oeuvre. All the epigrammatic reckless mottos in the world don't mean shit if they aren't backed up with music that makes you want to yell and dance around your room in weird contortions like you're wrestling with an angry ghost. Direct Hit!'s songs are fucking amazing. Pop-punk classics, every one.

There's not a single one I'd skip. I bought the triple cassette anthology of their first 5 EPs which gave you a chance to vote for which ten songs I wanted to hear rerecorded for their first proper album, and it was an unreasonably stressful hour or two spent narrowing it down.

I love Arson Hero, a burn shit down punk song as sung by Sesame Street's Count von Count. I love Werewolf Shame, a song about simply being a werewolf, but of course anything dealing with lycanthropy is inevitably going to deal with the central metaphor of struggling to contain an inner beast, just as the zombie theme of They Came for Me works both as a fun lock-and-load singalong about the living dead, and also about attacking the overwhelming power of mainstream society in the way that Dawn of the Dead does. There's a Reaganomicsesque fuck you to self-pity on Mom and Dad. In Orbit is basically a sappy "I want to spend the rest of my life with you" nation-of-two style love song, with that emotion both subverted and intensified by placing this desire in the context of it happening on an isolated space station (where presumably they'd watch bad b-movies over and over again and make snarky comments about them). Mutant Drunk has the stumbling intoxicated rhythm and fury of a screaming bender. My favourite song is Snickers Or Reese's (Pick Up The Pieces), which reminds me thematically of a song I wrote when I was 15 called They Still Want Me Dead about having ex-girlfriends want to kill you, long before I'd even ever worked up the nerve to talk to a girl. Snickers or Reese's has an amazing moment (a bit like AM!'s We Laugh at Danger and Break All the Rules) where it feels like the noise and enthusiasm of the song is so intense that it flames itself the fuck out, a momentary pause, a restless 'fuck' delivered somewhere between frustration and exhaustion and straight back into the chorus, like the second when you're accidentally thrown tumbling out of the pit and need a brief second to check yourself for broken bones or lost shoes before hurling yourself back into the dancing morass.

Whatever level you take the songs on, the collection of monsters, drunkenness, silly decisions, and wry reminiscing about monstrously silly drunken decisions, they all work first and foremost as an amazing uplifting poppy noisy FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED! punk-fucking-pumping-rock anthem. The only bands I've even come close to listening to as much in the past year as Direct Hit! are Hickey (Hickey are the best band ever) and Paintbox and all their demented intensity. I love this band, I love the defiantly juvenile purity of purpose, I love that every song seems to be constructed solely out of fantastic choruses bolted on to one another, as if there's no reason that the great moment in a song where the verse revs up into the singalong section shouldn't be every single moment of the song, I love the homemade merch and the sheer enthusiasm they seem to radiate. And when I am approaching something like an acceptable level of solvency, I am going to put my money where my mouth is, and have those four words that represent the most succinct possible summation of my entire philosophy with regards to punk rock, art and life seared indelibly into my skin for the rest of my stupid, inevitably snotty and hopefully exciting life. Chances are it will be a monstrously silly drunken decision, but shit, this is what we are. Punk rock, man. In all its tender fuckheaded glory. One more time from the top:

FUUUUCK YOOOOU! GEEEET PUMMMMPED!

So Scratched into our Souls #1: Fuckboyz - Rock and Roll Problem

2011-05-16T03:09:00.019+01:00

This is a new series I have decided to start for those times where I really just want to talk about how much one specific song just fucking rules.

Fuckboyz are a band generally known today (if they are even known at all, which usually they're not) because they featured Matty Luv, later of Hickey. Hickey are the best band ever, and I plan on explaining exactly why that is at a later date, but for now I'm gonna focus on this particular Fuckboyz song, because it proves that they weren't just a dry-run for the sloppy chaotic majesty of Hickey (Hickey are the best band ever), like The Lazer with Bent Outta Shape, they may not have quite developed the amazing sound that made me fall in love with them but they've still got plenty of pure talent and the ability to write some great fucking punk rock.

The closest song I can think of to Rock and Roll Problem is the Dead Kennedys' Pull My Strings, but Pull My Strings doesn't really work on its own. It's a broad juvenalian satire more than an actual song, the context of the song is what makes it so amazing. Their one-time performance of it at the Bay area music awards is one of the most punk rock things anyone has ever done, informed socio-cultural outrage distilled into noisy and hilarious blunt critique delivered right in the face of people who want you to conform. In fact the only thing I can think that was comparable in the realms of sheer punk rockness is the Voodoo Glow Skulls split by Hickey (Hickey are the best band ever). But as I said, I'm not sure Pull My Strings works without its context. DK never recorded it in a studio or even played it again, and I think that was entirely the right decision. It's a song built on the combination of history and place, like Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner at Woodstock. More an artifact of an attitude perfectly expressed than something to love for its actual sound. Rock and Roll Problem is not like Pull My Strings, in that it works as a completely great song on its own, but it is like Jello's finest hour (yes, Pull My Strings is even finer than destroying Tipper Gore on the Oprah Winfrey show) in that its a broad parody of mainstream rock and roll which has a completely awesome solo in the middle of it.

The solo is interesting, in both these songs, as the point of it seems to be, "Look, we're not playing punk rock music because we can't play anything else. We're playing punk rock music because we love punk rock music." Now I love punk rock music that springs from the inability to play anything more complex, but the idea that those are its only practitioners is completely false. I love punk rock music because of how it sounds, its attitude, its politics, its intelligence, its stupidness, its speed, its rhythm, its power. A whole fucking host of other reasons, not just its simplicity.

A good instrumental or solo is really great. And I'm not talking about the self-indulgent aural masturbation of a prog rock keyboard marathon, not the heavy rock drum solos of the early 70s played only to show off how many beats someone can play, described by my dad (a big fan of that era and sound) as bands helpfully working in toilet breaks into their set. What I'm talking about is a section of a song, however brief or extended, that takes the thrust of the song and carries it forward without words, that recognises that there are times when a sensation is wordless, when, no matter how important the words are, the reason we're listening to the song is because of the verve and manner with which they're delivered. You can hear all the squealing fun of the Toy Dolls jokey lyrics in Olga's guitar solos, all the cross-cultural anger in the bounce of a Cobra Skulls bridge. Just any fucking good song, really. That's pretty much what good pop music is, the perfect marriage between music and lyrics, form and function, style and content. And in Rock and Roll Problems you can hear all the pissy anger, driving rock and roll and satirical sniping at Lynyrd Skynyrd and their ilk all rolled into that searing solo which is at first insistent and before rising into a real wailing crescendo, dropping back again to let the bass bumble about for a bit, before kicking back in briefly before the music drops down to its simplest for the final lyrics of the song.

The lyrics are a great mixture of a rock music macho parody and punk rock posturing. It begins "I've got a girlfriend and it's alright. sometimes we get along and sometimes we fight. sometimes I think I dig her but I'm not really sure. if she's different from the others or she's just another whore." It's not just a satire on the excesses of rock music, but pointing out that the dumbness of punk rock lyrics isn't really particularly special, that transplanted into a mid-tempo rock anthem they might be just as tired and stupid, but there it kind of fails, because it's such a good rock song makes you want to sing along to the studiedly dumb lyrics like "I've got a guitar that won't stay in tune. I've got a car that won't run and a cool tattoo. some people think I'm stupid and some people think I'm not. some people want to meet me in the parking lot. gabba gabba hey let's make a bomb. will you suck me off if I play you this song?" and then after all the solo when it drops back to the stark simple beat and the back-up singer starts screaming the lyrics with throat-burning intensity behind the simple enunciation of the lead singer it's a really thrilling moment, instilling genuine emotion into the line "What does it mean when I say I'm in love? Does it mean anything at all?" which works both as an honest self-examination and as a commentary on the cheapness of emotion in rock music. The persuasively good nature of the music means that even as you realise it's stupid you still want to spend all you money on alcohol and spray paint, and paint this city black. You still want to steal a car and drive to the world's end and jump right in the sea. It's an amazing song that can jump between singing along to some ironic statement about the dearth of well-characterised women in all rock music, to spouting punk rock non-sequiturs that you've romanticised and built up all your life (it's got a Ramones slogan, and an apparent reference to the time Joe Strummer got arrested in Germany) and sort of point out the lack of real distinction between the two, but also leave you sure of the parts of rock and roll you love, and the parts that piss you off. It's fucking complicated, but above all that, it's an amazing song that maintains its tension perfectly over its seven minute runtime and you can't help but bounce and sing and play air guitar along to it, like the worst rock cliché in the world. There are problems with most rock and roll and we've all got a rock and roll problem.

Also, it ends on the line 'If I leave here tomorrow' and we all know where that's going. This is the song that bands should play when dickheads request Freebird.

Like all Hickey (Hickey are the best band ever) and Fuckboyz songs, it's available here.

Rock and Roll Problem

The Gateway District - Perfect's Gonna Fail

2011-05-13T17:43:00.008+01:00

The first album by this band, Some Days You Get The Thunder, is a complete favourite of mine, as you really may have guessed. Like Caves and The Measure (SA), they could broadly be described in exactly the same way, as scratchy pop-punk with female vocals in the Discount tradition. The way I sold people on their first album was by telling them that it was like The Measure (SA) if you replaced all the spindly indie/folky influences with rollicking country ones.

There is practically no country influence on this album, in fact there are bits of the album (especially in the opener) that at times reminds me of an oft-overlooked pop-punk album that is put down because of its origins, and that's the Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack album. People get sniffy about it, which is fair enough, because it is the slick product of a team of Hollywood screenwriters and major label musicians working for hire and we all want to believe that something is inevitably going to be better if it comes from a place of desire and naive unstudied creative impulse, but if you retagged that album, knocked off the titular closing track and sent it to someone really into that late-70s power-pop Runaways/Joan Jett style or even the classic Lookout/Ramonescore sound telling them it was by The Battledykes or The Spazzys they would lose their shit over it. This Gateway District album is infinitely better than Josie and the Pussycats and it's nowhere near as saccharine sweet but in its moments of sheer fun and infectiousness it bears a few recognisable strands of the same bubblegum DNA.

A far more prominent part of their sound is Jawbreaker. That certain feel that comes from the thick prominent chugging bass, that sort of rolling train rhythm, the clunk and clang of metal on metal twisted into a propulsive motion. That's the central sound here, but, like last year's brilliant Dead Mechanical album, they eschew the more sprawling tendencies of Jawbreaker, ending up somewhere near what the short pop-punk Bad Scene, Everyone's Fault on the slightly slicker major label Dear You might sound like if it had been sung with the painful vocal exasperation, the rawness of feeling and production of their earlier albums. There's not a bad song on this album, but a few do really stand out.

New Hands has a slow tense opening over which your hear "When they cut off my hands threw me money. I grew new hands so I could pick it up. When they cut off my legs they all came for me. I grew new hands, to escape this love." where the guitar chords are like the tolling of a bell. The whole intro reminds me of a dolorous Soviet worker's anthem sung in ironic defiance, the power of a single voice erasing for just a moment the cold trudge of totalitarian unity, before the whole situation snaps into raging life and blasts through the rest of the song in the same punk tone that dominates the album.

Fishman's Story is a song that trades off the mystery and appeal of the sea and the long history of art dealing with that topic, like Mark Richard's Fishboy or that Simpsons joke where Homer announces "I'll live out at sea. The sea forgives all! Not like those mean old mountains. I hate them so much!" The humour in Homer's announcement comes from a physical counterpoint highlighting the absurdity of the way we do tend to anthropomorphise such a huge geographical object, such an unknowable elemental force and assign it human characteristics and personality, but we can't help it. The sea is such a large potent image, such an awesome physical presence that its metaphoric power is almost unlimited. Here are some mad-libs for you: The (object) was like the sea. She (past tense of a verb) like the sea. He had the (emotion) of the sea inside him. Kind of always works, doesn't it? The song here starts off in the same slow manner as New Hands, building and falling, speeding up and slowing down. She sings "No-one knows there's a wrecking that's shifting under there/No-one knows it's the wreck not the wind that causes waves to tear" equating the depth and blackness of the sea with the depths of the human soul, as many have done before. As far as an approach to the topic, of course it works and the song is really great, one of my favourites on the album, but my personal favourite song dealing with this broad topic is (you guessed it) a Jawbreaker song, The Boat Dreams From the Hill, which deals with the yearning for purpose, in which the sea is not a moonlit mass aswell with human desire and emotion, but the place where we can return to, the sea is a simple home where the boat dreams of 'fishy flutter on its rudder'.

File this paragraph under not particularly relevant but whatever: There's a brief moment in Fishman's Story that reminds me of Jimmy Ruffin's What Becomes of the Brokenhearted and when writing this review I had to pause my constant playback of the album to open up Youtube and croon along to some absolutely fucking stellar classic Motown, which is probably better than whatever you're listening to right now. Now if I had any sort of technical knowledge of music I would be able to tell you in precise terms exactly why this similarity leapt at me, or why I made that comparison on New Hands to Leninist people's hymns (or maybe, I just realised, it really only reminded me of that Wat Tyler song which pretends to be a Leninist people's hymn), but for me I can only just stumble on with my little connections, unsure of quite what the proper reasons I have for music sparking off all sorts of touchstones, propinquitous memories and imaginative leaps, never quite sure whether I'm just fantasing a real connection like when the start of Against Me!'s Don't Lose Touch seems to recall Jimmy Cliff's You Can Get it If You Really Want for a few seconds or while waiting for the next episode of Wizards of Waverly Place to start on the Disney channel I found myself subjected to Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana/Biggie's finest collaborator and her song He Could Be the One which made me think that None More Black's Oh, There's Legwork had been licensed to the company of ol' icebox Walt and his mousy descendants.

The Gateway District have constructed a well put-together album that never runs out of steam or drags as it works that thick overdriven Jawbreaker base into an insistent cohesive work, but it isn't perfect. While it has some real high-points as I've mentioned already, none of them quite grabbed me by the throat as the way the music peters out for a second on the title track of Some Days You Get the Thunder before the titular lyric is screamed. Or the drumless bit on Lake Street is for Suckers that draws you down into this small dreamy and seductive vision of getting stoned with on Motorhead's tour-bus travelling through Georgia, treating Lemmy as a combination of a confidant and some growling bewarted sage. I think I do still prefer the first album which did all that Perfect's Gonna Fail does sonically and also incorporated some Pretty Boy Thorson style country shunt into their sound. You could describe the first album as roughly somewhere between a speeded-up version of Kiss the Bottle, and a speeded-up version of Lucero's cover of Kiss the Bottle, whereas here they've stripped away the Lucero and I'm not entirely sure why, maybe they just got bored with it.

But if we're talking about Jawbreaker so much, why not just listen to Jawbreaker, why does this album not fit into that selection of music that generally makes me go "Yeah, this is pretty good, but it just reminds me of something better that you're not doing that anything more than." The Riverdales stuff with the exception of a couple of great tracks (Rehabilitated, Werewolf One, I Don't Wanna Go To the Party) never really catches me enough to forget that I'm listening to a band that really wants to be the first couple of Ramones albums, so I just go back and listen to Leave Home again.

Similarly, Flogging Molly are a great fun live band, and while they have more obvious heavier drive than the Pogues and something like Drunken Lullabies or What's Left of the Flag is a well-constructed blend of celtic-folk, misguided Republican pride and punk rock attitude, no-one is under the illusion that they're doing something that wasn't done miles better by a man who had his ear cut off at a Clash gig and was drunk enough all the time that his songwriting seemed to commune with the social and self-loathing spirit of alcohol itself. These aren't massive criticisms really, the first couple Ramones album are the basic sonic template for most of the music I like, no matter how weirder or noisier or faster or heavier or more complex it gets compared to Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue. And Shane McGowan is in that hallowed group of songwriters that have such skill and ability to root themselves in musical traditions while interpreting them in new ways, like Waits, Dylan, Jason Webley and Erik Petersen. These people are capable of writing songs that sounded like they've been around forever from the first moment they're played, songs hewn from the giving flesh of a whole culture, songs so artful they can't have been constructed by one man, they must have organically formed themselves in gutters, long walks home and barroom singalongs, coalescing from pain and camaraderie and misremembered stories retold a thousand times, imbued with all the same mythic and modern pressure as Joyce's Sirens, afternoon-drunk in the bar and restaurant of the Ormond Hotel. "A low incipient note sweet banshee murmured: all. A thrush. A throstle. His breath, birdsweet, good teeth he's proud of, fluted with plaintive woe. Is lost. Rich sound. Two notes in one there. Blackbird I heard in the hawthorn valley. Taking my motives he twined and turned them. All most too new call is lost in all. Echo. How sweet the answer. How is that done? All lost now. Mournful he whistled. Fall, surrender, lost." That's the fucking Pogues. That's not Flogging Molly, and it never ever will be. Just as The Gateway District will probably never reach the level of Schwarzenbach's lyrics, which are capable of springing effortlessly between literate late-night musings, artful metaphorical constructions and simple universal evocations of secret moments.

These aren't big putdowns, they're an inevitable damnation springing from unrealistic but warranted comparison to the perfect ur-sound that someone's try to evoke, so Perfect's Gonna Fail would be a very good, extremely listenable piece of work if all it did was call up memories of Blake Schwarzenbach and co, but it doesn't just do that. So why does Perfect's Gonna Fail, shorn of the country twang that was blended seamlessly into their basic rolling punk rock sound on its predecessor, not just make me want to put on 24 Hour Revenge Therapy again. And it's simple, it's the voice.

It's an amazing voice. It would have to be to evoke even for a second the lovelorn spell of Jimmy Ruffin's one moment in the spotlight. It's a pair of amazing voices, I should say. The Gateway District has two duelling singers who are both pretty similar, to the extent where I can't actually tell which one is singing until they're both singing at the same time and one is usually at a slightly higher-pitch than the other. It's confusing sometimes, like someone performing a duet with themselves. But they're both fucking great. The vocals are so key to the whole appeal of this band. They yelp and sneer and drawl. They croon and howl and talk. They ache. They really fucking sing. Look back to my Caves review and recognise what I say when I say that the vocals combine both the integral collaborative nature of way The Measure (SA)'s vocals work in concert with the music and the fierce blustering power present in Caves. The Gateway District vocals don't just work perfectly with the music though, they play brilliantly off of each other, one working as a slightly discordant reflection placed either as an airier version of the deep furious scope of the lead vocals, or a thick booming shadow of their lighter force, a wild polyphony of sound focusing a taut harmony of emotion. In this they remind me of the way the Vindictives so fantastically utilised the voice as a structural tool in songwriting, whoa-ohs dipping and diving around the lead singer, sometimes used for wordless wailing like another instrument, sometimes jumping in with poppy echoes to repeat a phrase, sometimes joining in for just the emphasis of a word or two like a hip-hop crew. The raucous phrasing, the way that Carrie and Maren know exactly when to drag a word out with a single lonely howl and when to spit it quickly with a twinned shout, lends the lyrics far more weight and meaning than they would have not just as written, but as sung by just one person throughout in a smoother voice.

I have actually seen them live but I can't quite remember who sang most of the songs as I was slightly-pissed and dancing madly with my one friend trying to distract myself from the fact that most of the crowd who had gone nuts for some of the opening bands had fucked-off, or if they stayed just formed the indifferent semi-circle of arms-crossed doom around my effusively bopping self and my mate Rich. They deserve such a better response than that. They're a band full of talent, just listen to the way they build atmosphere with the escalating repetition of "You worthless piece of shit. You worthless piece of shit" on Blue Halls as it crops up through the song first as a murmur of doubt and then later as a shrieking hateful accusation. Just listen to the way they have pull off the almost Sinatran snap of an approximated 'do-be-do' thrown into the racket on Queen Avenue. Despite the fact I prefer Some Days You Get the Thunder, this is fine punk songwriting shining and sucking you in with the fun, the tightness and fullness of their sound and then blowing you away with the conviction of their lyrics conveyed though the utterly mesmeric power of the human voice.

Post script:

Lessons learned from this review: I would make things a lot easier on myself if I made more of an effort to remember shit precisely. I did have a great quote for the bit about the Josie and the Pussycats, something about how Joan Jett is a robot or secret agent designed to trick and seduce little girls into liking rock and roll. I'm fairly sure I read it in a Razorcake interview, I skimmed through all my issues and couldn't find it. That wasn't so bad though, it's cool to skim through all your Razorcakes now and then. What wasn't so fun was failing to remember precisely which Miley Cyrus song resembled None More Black so to make sure I wasn't going nuts I had to go to the List of Miley Cyrus songs on Wikipedia and listen to the first ten seconds of every single one of her songs on Youtube only to find that it wasn't on the list. In doing so I learned, the first ten seconds of every single Miley Cyrus song sound like some other song, in every genre from hip-hop to classical to reggae to country to ragtime to college rock, I can only hope that this soulless musical pillaging (which exists as a sneering capitalist distortion, a toxic corporate parody of the reckless roaming spirit behind Tom Waits or The Clash or the World/Inferno Friendship Society) inspires at least one happy tween on the verge of adolescent breakdown to connect with a particular genre and delve into it, finding themselves in a few short years with an encyclopedic knowledge of Peter Tosh records or reliving in their mind the beautiful rebellion of the swingjugend possessing a deep denial they ever sang along with the spawn of a man about whom we can only lament that Bill Hicks died before his titty-filled fevered ego slaying pilot got produced. In the end I discovered that the song wasn't on that list because it's not a Miley Cyrus song, it's a fucking Hannah Montana song. God, I felt like someone who hated horror but read Stephen King's entire bibliography looking for a particular book that their father told them to read from his death bed so they could finally understand their family traditions and genetic place in the world, only to find it was actually a Richard Bachman novel. Fuck you, dead dad. And fuck you, whichever Disney motherfucker came up with the idea of bolting the central tension of all superhero fiction on to an updating of the Monkees which amplified all the cynical cross-media marketing to an apocalyptic gargantua of prickvertising 'synergy' whilst surgically removing all the mad naivete and enthusiasm that led Mickey, Davey, Petey and Mike to burn their career to the fucking ground in the batshit psychedelic firestorm of an early Jack Nicholson movie.

Caves - Collection

2011-05-09T21:40:00.002+01:00

It's impossible for me to talk about this band without comparing them to The Measure (SA). Lauren Measure has talked about how much she's a fan of this band and when I first encountered them in an underground London bowling alley I was wearing a Measure (SA) shirt that the lead singer talked to me about when I bought a shirt and 7" off them. It's not just a set of trite coincidences that equate these bands in my mind though, they do both play a similar sort of scratchy melancholy-tinged pop-punk with female vocals in the Discount tradition.

They're a very different sort of female vocals though. Lauren Measure's voice works because it's this almost light and airy thing which seems incongrous in the way it's far more melodious than the music around it and it sort of ducks and dives through the thrashy-pop that surrounds it, struggling to emerge on top. Louise Hanman's vocals in Caves are a different beast entirely, while searching for a word to properly sum them up I kept coming up with 'monotonous' which just really sounds like a criticism but I don't mean it as one. I'm trying to get to the idea that while they're incapable of the intricacies you get in the The Measure (SA), they're far more powerful in a way. They don't work as a counterpoint to the music, they power forward, dragging the music behind them in their wake. They're properly shouty in the way that a good punk vocalist can be, strident and exciting, turning its technical limitations into its emotional strength.

Like I said, the music seems to follow the vocals, and in that way again it's less complex in its structure than the The Measure (SA), they don't like to let a song run around through different styles with slow-intros building into bigger angrier sounds, or faking endings only to stomp back into action. Caves prefer to hit a certain sweet spot and work it, repeating a couple of lines of lyrics over the same riff, grinding out a little repetitive groove and eeking all the tension and meaning out of that simple little refrain. It's like a more complex less explicit take on the Herman's Hermits/Judy is a Punk announcement "Second verse, same as the first!" This album is a really enjoyable listen and perfect proof that while two bands can appear to be doing the same sort of thing, the way they approach it and execute it is completely different.

Fucked Up - David's Town

2011-05-09T21:31:00.001+01:00

Fucked Up specialise in ideas that really shouldn’t work. Their latest album is a fake compilation of imaginary ‘77 UK bands from a fictional town. They really capture the loose garagey fuzz and snotty drive of a lot of the peripheral bands of that time that never quite broke through into the mainstream when they could and now are generally only remembered for a song or two that crops up on real versions of this sort of compilation, or because the band members went on to other more prestigious endeavours.

The era that they’ve imitated so perfectly is that odd point where suburban bands were blasting out numbers in every dingy basement on every dingy street that didn’t always fit the standard punk rock template we think of now because the definite notions and conventions of a punk song hadn’t really been properly codified yet, so there’s invention born out of both a desire to just play what sounds cool, and also out of an inability to imitate Pretty Vacant or Janie Jones perfectly and you get a lot of slightly weird, off-kilter stuff that prefigures the later more deliberate sonic explorations of more obviously post-punk (and later indie-rock) bands. And Fucked Up have made an album that really sucks all those sounds together, just as they’re simultaneously coming together as a definite scene and breaking apart as a cohesive genre. It’s kind of amazing.

Of course the strengths of the album are also its weaknesses. The sort of compilations that it's aping will always feature a combination of really great stuff and things you just couldn't give a shit about. I love the pub-rock stomp lifting into the happy wailing of pop-punk of the opening track here. I like the fuzzy Unrequited Love which starts off like it was made by a bunch of people too enamoured with 60s music of girl groups and psychedelia to commit to a simple punk song, but so full of the exuberance of the time they can't help but make something that also works as well in this punk rock setting as any song off Damned, Damned, Damned. I can't stop listening to Do You Feed (The Curry Song) which somehow grasps the oddly important position that curry takes in the British national psych as a crossroads of culinary machismo and a wholehearted embrace of the benefits of multiculturalism (in the same way that the Goodness Gracious Me 'Going for an English' sketch does where a drunken Indian boldly announces to the catcalls of his friends "I'll have the blandest thing on the menu!") and then makes a really great punk song out of it that comes the closest of any on the album to that retroactively applied notion of the typical '77 sound. In contrast, I found that the closing track It's Hard to Be a Dad was far too twee for me, but the appeal of this album is its diversity and the excitement of the first listen is going through the different styles and finding out its surprises for yourself.

The Reaganomics - Lower the Bar

2011-05-09T14:13:00.000+01:00

The first line of this album is "WELL I DON'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOUR BAND!" which sets the tone fairly comprehensively.

This is a punk rock album for people who are into punk rock for the hate, not the sort of painful damaging morally void hate of post-All Skrewed Up Skrewdriver, but the petty but very real sense of outrage and irrationally intense loathing that springs from what really should be a minor annoyance that, instead of just dismissing and forgetting as stupid, you allow to fester and grow into an unfathomably important all-consuming despair at how anyone in the world can live their life like that. The Reaganomics just write fun arsehole songs about how everyone and everything sucks, eviscerating trend-followers, the faux-Irish, Ed Hardy wearers, critics, yuppies, other punk bands with equal relish. There are a few positive numbers that are conducted with the same sense of glee as the sophomoric diss tracks, but while you get brief happy moments when The Reaganomics really want to party with Robocop or visit the Renaissance Fair, you're soon back to learning that they don't want to end up at a bar with someone they don't like, they don't want to go work, they don't want to go to school, they don't want to read your blog (so I really could say what the fuck I want here with absolutely no chance of retribution).

The great thing about this album is that they're so scattershot in their targets that it's inevitable they're going to hit upon some niggle of modern society, some little tribe or attitude that just gets under your skin and though you know it's stupid to care so much about it you just can't help it. There's probably going to be a song on this album that you don't just like because it's fun and stupid and easy to sing along to, they'll be something where you'll genuinely feel the sense of ridiculously inflated malice towards its intended target.

There's a sort of self-defeating sense to it because it's a profoundly negative album for the most part, but it's the sounds of a bunch of nerds in their basement putting the world to rights and while that doesn't really sound appealing, they're talented enough musically to get you on their side, so you get to vicariously enjoy their pet hates streamed into 90 second pop-punk songs full of brief angry solos and really big choruses. It's the maelstrom of minor frustrations that can slow you down or impede your journey through life cathartically channeled into creating something incredibly dumb and incredibly catchy.

Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All

2011-05-08T16:00:00.001+01:00

I don't claim to have a great critical knowledge of hip-hop. I like a lot of it, but I don't really have the time to fully invest in two genres to the extent that I'd need to to write really well about the mechanics of the music, but my grounding in punk rock is kind of helpful here, as OFWGKTA are undeniably in the tradition of anti-establishment nihilistic punk rock heroes like The Sex Pistols and the Stooges (but then I've always held that punk and hip-hop are genres with significant parallels to one another).

As a Guardian reader, a paper which clings desperately both to its finger-on-the-pulse cultural relevance and its incredibly PC liberal credentials, in the last couple of days I've encountered several handwringing articles regarding Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All and the accusations of misogyny and homophobia that have been flung that them which I feel the need to address a little.

First things first, I think anyone who's condemning them is probably vital to their success. I don't know if Tyler or the rest of the gang will end up on the cover of The Sun with the headline KICK THIS EVIL BASTARD OUT as Snoop Dogg did but there's nothing like a moral panic to kick record sales into the stratosphere. And imagine how shit it would be as a teenager to find that the great vital new band that you were into was completely palatable to your parents.

Secondly, yes there are extremely questionable lyrics on show, but there's plenty of homophobia, anti-semitism and misogyny in now-canonical hip-hop acts like Public Enemy or NWA, but the music is exciting because it's so raw and to remove all the elements we don't like would be to sanitise it and tone down the impact of the whole. Also, there is an inevitable problem of determining how much is done in character and how much is genuine malice (and then even whether that matters if some people are going to take it at face value). The trickiness with rap is that it's often a first-person narrative just a couple of steps away from the actual person's mentality, but there's something condescending about assuming that a 20 year old black kid isn't as capable as of knowingly trading on the sanguinary theatricality of rape and murder in the way that someone like Nick Cave does on his approximately 8000 songs about stoving a maiden's head in with a big rock.

Tyler is clearly angrily and awkwardly self-aware in what he's doing in the way that some of the best teenage music is. The first and final tracks of Goblin are thrilling dialogues with an imaginary therapist that mix anger, attitude and humour as they swing between cutting sarcasm aimed at his detractors, goofy self-deprecation and caustic self-loathing and address head-on every single problem and question you could have about the morality, intention and truth behind his lyrics. But even with this intense scathing exegesis of his own lyrics, I still feel real and undeniable unease with regards to the most extreme moments of sexualised ultraviolence that he describes, no matter how much I know that it is a complicated combination of tongue-in-cheek splatstick anti-PC trolling, morbid character acting and valid self-examination of the darker parts of a bright but confused brain, but as Lester Bangs said about Johnny Rotten (another similar shock merchant who alternated between playing smart and playing dumb) and his most offensive songs: "I'm still not comfortable with 'Bodies.' But then I never was, which may be the point. But then I wonder if he is. After which I cease to wonder at anything beyond the power of this music."

And the music is undeniably powerful, the lyrics are rasped over intensely atmospheric and skeletal production leaving the brutality and rawness of words and delivery centre stage, in the same way Rick Rubin put Johnny Cash's voice so high in the mix on his American Recordings, but there it was about the power of time and sonorous melancholy in the vocal chords, here it's all about the spitting fury of youth. This is definitely music I'll return to, even if I'm probably going to skip a few of the most graphically misogynist tracks. If you don't like Odd Future, fair enough, but if you claim they're some sort of amoral harbinger of doom, you're old and boring. And the more you claim you're not old and boring, the older and more boring you will sound to the kid in the FREE EARL t-shirt who has finally found the thrill of some illicit culture aimed purely at them.

Paintbox - Trip, Trance and Travelling

2011-05-08T06:28:00.000+01:00

Maybe the strength of this album is diluted if I actually talk about what it sounds like before you listen to it. Certainly some of the strongest reactions that people I know have given it come from the utter shock of its sound. So I will beseech you to fucking trust me on this and just get this bloody album.

Okay, that's not really enough for some people, and fair enough. So here are some pithy sonic comparisons to get you to listen to it: GISM if they allied their searing solos with a forthright melodic sensibility rather than their low-fi minatory drone. Motörhead if they covered the songs you generally get over the ending credits of Japanese beat-em-ups. Chinese Democracy if it was worth the wait.

I don't have a huge grounding in the history of Japanese punk, so there may be some factual errors here, but as I understand it, Paintbox were a Japanese hardcore band who traveled in a particular subgenre known as burning spirits, apparently named after a certain tour in Japan, the characteristic sound of which is basically a defiantly uptempo punk thrasher featuring the sort of solos you haven't heard since the last time you stumbled across the Beat It video on a Sounds of the 80s marathon and listened to Eddie Van Halen make his guitar wail over the sight of a bunch of extras from The Warriors abandoning violence in favour of meticulously synchronised dance moves. The band that defined this style was Death Side who existed from 87-94 before disbanding and all their members going on to further develop the sound in the bands Judgement, Forward and Paintbox.

Out of those three bands, Paintbox are by far the easiest on the ears, on their albums Singing, Shouting, Crying and Earth Ball Sports Tournament they begin incorporate a myriad of other styles and sensibilities into the core of their burning spirits sound, but when I first came to Trip, Trance and Travelling I didn't know that. I had never heard of this band. All I knew was that I was listening to what I had been assured was a completely rocking album which began with a whole lot of mellow spacey guitar noodling and I was just starting to wonder whether I'd been prog-rolled when, almost two minutes in, the song bursts into angry thrashing life and I found myself swept up in a current of an irresistible hardcore punk rhythm, rough throaty vocals, marvelling more with each seamless sonic development, a chugging guitar part, a rumbling wandering bassline, a huge nonsensical chorus (one of the few bits of English on the album), a delirious guitar solo, keyboards, heraldic trumpets, a mellifluous lullaby of female vocals. After the first song, I was entranced, but I thought they surely couldn't keep up this intense and insane blend of styles for the whole album, there have been many bands where I've encountered a thrilling song only to find it to be the one moment when their talents and intentions transcended their limitations and they produce something amazing before collapsing into a generic samey mush. That is not Paintbox. This entire album, from the first note to the last, is imbued with the same nutty thrill of the first track, even on the mellower songs which are perfectly placed throughout the album for breathing space in the galloping onslaught punk rock that dominates the album. And this album lasts over seventy fucking minutes. Seventy!

Now when I listen to that first song I find the intro filled with tension, the bass swelling underneath, the soft guitar rising and falling, expanding and contracting, teasing you for the joyous moment when it rips into gear. It's one of those little bits of music, like the chorus in Dear Landlord's Three to the Beach, like first time the backing vocals kick in on The Vindictives' Assembly Line, that never fails to elicit a completely shit-eating grin from me. The most effective use of establishing and then subverting the expectations of a tender aural caress since the Butthole Surfers shouted SATAN! SATAN! SATAN! at the start of Locust Abortion Technician and then ploughed into a massive blast of Black Sabbath's Sweat Leaf tastefully retitled Sweat Loaf. There are far too many beautiful giddy moments like that on this album to catalogue them all, and part of the joy of this album is being constantly surprised by it, constantly finding bits where if you were were going to describe them to someone you would be constantly bookending your assessment of the sound with the panicky phrase 'but good', but here are a couple of bits that stand out to me:

the mariachi horns on Mental Picnic
the whole of Fields in the Moonlight, which for large parts of its seven minute duration gives itself over to the more melodic influences of the album until the screaming inevitably kicks in and its like you were listening to the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack on Winamp when someone linked you to a webpage which autoplayed Dangers. In fact, possibly the pithiest musical description of this entire beautiful mess to stand next to my previous comparisons would be four words: Yoko Kanno's hardcore album
the way the riff (which bears an odd resemblance to Jona Lewie's Stop the Cavalry) on the final track speeds up
the Chemical Warfare-esque squealing madness at the end of Raw Ore
the brief bass break in the middle of Retribution
the little tinkle before the guitar solo at the start of Praying

Lyrically I don't really have much to say about this album. I fell in love with it before I knew what the hell they were singing, which is fairly unusual for me. Even if a band's lyrics are completely dumb, I like to be able to singalong with them, but that's just another testament to the overwhelming power of the music. Since I first heard it, I've purchased the gorgeous gatefold double LP which comes complete with lyrical translations, and while its a relief to know I haven't been madly besotted with a concept album endorsing the Rape of Nanking, I still don't really care about what they're singing. The lyrics are kind of clunky in translation, but are perfectly workable fun punk exhortations of freedom. They don't completely work on paper, but few punk lyrics do. It's always about the way they're sung, the force put into them. I'm sure if you knew Japanese it would be a lot of fun to sing along to lines like "It's not enough/Destroy all the rules/ You will strike a mine called shyness and explode yourself/We are making preparations steadily" or "Going to the ends of the endless world/Using every trick to coax my rickety body/Swinging paralysing gasoline/Let's become ape-men with an engine and go" but for me they're sadly just a peripheral part of the whole experience.

I have utterly no problem with a band that just wants to play punk rock and never alter their style. I love The Copyrights more and more with each release and never expect them to change much. I'm enamoured with The Lillingtons, Guitar Wolf and Threatener and countless other bands that stick rigidly to a particular basic punk rock template, but there's such a complete feeling of delight to hear a band push the envelope of punk rock so far beyond its conventional bounds without ever losing the vim and fury that makes it so appealing. I've never been much of a metal fan, but this album is like everything I would always sort of want metal to sound like in its noise and bombast streamlined perfectly into happy bursts of infectious cacophony.

In the making of this album, Chelsea, the guitarist of Paintbox and before that Death Side, died, as did Mayuko Sakai, the woman responsible for the beautiful ethereal female vocals that perfectly counterpoint the angry growl of the lead singer (whose name remains unstranslated in the lyrics booklet). Now it would be jejune and probably offensive to speculate that the decade long struggle to produce this album in all its epic scope contributed to their death (Chelsea by all accounts had a pretty big drug problem for a long time (online you can find a report of someone seeing him play a show with a heroin baggie hanging from the mic) and died after apparently spending several days getting drunk and not eating in a hot apartment without adequate air-conditioning), instead I'll say that in the searing beauty of this album, the glorious derangement of the whole endeavour, the way it makes the absurd sounding mix of psychedelia and punk rock, J-pop and thrash, lounge jazz and metal, prog and hardcore sound like the most natural thing in the world and never gets tired or boring over a running time about the same as Buster Keaton's The General, there exists a testament to the astounding skill and artistry of all involved in making this masterpiece, and to the assimilative powers of all punk rock, and ultimately to just the way that music itself is constantly evolving and constantly surprising and constantly finding strange and madcap new approaches to soundtrack the fractal delirium of the human condition.

Bomb the Music Industry in Manchester and London

2011-04-21T17:46:00.001+01:00

The plan was simple. Me and my mate Tommy would make our ways from our respective homes in Oxford and Croydon up to Manchester to meet some friends and get drunk and see Bomb the Music Industry before traveling back down the next day to see them again in London, thus indulging our intense love for this band whilst having a good time with friends all the while trying bravely to convince ourselves we weren't just punk rock deadheads.

I got off the train around one and no-one spoke as I crossed the bright platform to the pub. I had a Guinness, read a little Burroughs and listened to the bigscreen Formula One whine as I waited for my mate Geo. When he got there I finished my pint and we wandered around trying to find somewhere we could get something simple to eat and stumbling into what we thought was a simple pub that did food we found ourselves accidentally having an intimate dinner with each other in what turned out to be a proper restaurant cleverly disguised as a good honest English drinking establishment. Fucking gastropubs. After that we headed for his house to dump my bag, have a quick drink and play a couple rounds of Timesplitters 2, which I won easily as it's a game which occupied a large part of my arrant teenage years. Still got it.

Heading out again to meet Tommy at the coach station, entertained briefly by a friendly insistent Mormon on a bus, we again wandered around in the cold until we found the venue which was closed so we decamped to the nearest pub for several hours of jukebox bullying with DK, SLF, Dolly Parton, The Toy Dolls, The Ramones, Public Enemy, Motorhead and Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. The landlady actually turned it up as exhorted by the chorus of Bring the Noise, the second best reaction I've received to a jukebox choice after the time a pub landlord gave me a free drink for playing Smokey Robinson. As we got steadily drunker on Guinness and Newcastle Brown, me and Tommy bemused Geo with a series of dumb in-jokes and obscure punk references told in our effeminate southern accents. We also lost a bunch of money on the quiz machine and soon enough it was time to walk down the street and enter the venue, The Tiger Lounge.

The band playing as we walked in weren't bad but their lead singer was stunningly unenthusiastic, delivering his vocals as if he was doing an announcement over the tannoy of a department store, so the only thing to do was get drunker. And we did, I got very drunk, our other friend Matt arrived and bought me a drink and soon I was stumbling about the place generally acting like an effusive friendly dickhead, telling a guy in a FREE MORGAN TSANGVIRAI t-shirt that I was so bummed I couldn't wear my FREE AUNG SAN SUU KYI shirt any more, reminiscing with (MY NEW BEST FRIEND FOREVER AND EVER OBVIOUSLY) Jeff Rosenstock about the time last year I accidentally stalked him on the London underground, telling some guy in a Rosa shirt an extremely bad joke about The Menzingers and that Cormac McCarthy's Suttree is the second greatest punk rock novel ever written (Double Duce is obviously the first) and also trying to foggily explain to Jeff that he is so awesome because he writes songs that read as depressing but he sings them in the opposite way and the way he does that has a long and amazing history in music, like Bob Dylan singing bitterness in soaring triumphant tones in Like a Rolling Stone, like Cee-Lo twisting together heartbreak and spite and furious glee in Fuck You, like Off With Their Heads shredding the worst thoughts that you could possibly have into the most wallsmashing glorious rising noise in most of their songs, the act of taking a negative image or feeling and throwing it into a huge sweeping singalong chorus does such a funny wonderful thing to your head, it's such a delightful dissonance between these two feelings expressed at exactly the same time and it's a trick that has been perfected in the best rock and roll and pop music, the dual evocation of emotions, the irony of an anthem about no-one understanding you that you sing along to with dozens who understand that sensation. I tried to say all that, but yeah, I was pretty fucking drunk, so I'm not sure how much got out, but we hugged afterwards, or maybe I dreamed that last part.

So I guess if I was good gig reviewer I would give some sort of overview of the other opening bands, so here is what I can remember: there was a band that seemed pretty good when I was paying attention and I later learned that they were a band I've actually heard of and heard (Dividers) and think are pretty good so I probably would've enjoyed more if I hadn't been stumbling around the back of the room pestering random people. There was also a mediocre straight-up trad ska/reggae band of the sort that I thought stopped getting booked for punk shows when I was about seventeen. Truly the North of England is a backwards and frightening place. Their lazy rhythms would occasionally permeate my drunken haze and I would stop, skank half-heartedly for about five seconds, spill some of my drink over myself and think better of it then continue with talking bollocks to irritated Mancunians. Good for those guys for ploughing their own unfashionable furrow, I guess.

But then BTMI! came on and I was right to the front, there was no stage at all, they were just playing in an alcove inside a little archway. It was when they started playing that I realised I was so drunk I had forgotten most of the words and melodies to one of my favourite bands. I still danced like a loon and latched onto the more recognisable choruses (I sang "I'm 23" during '25' because I was in that ALL THESE SONGS ARE ABOUT ME! level of intoxication) and spent most of the show with my arms raised against the ceiling trying not to fall into the band and smack one of them in the face with the microphone, a prospect which they looked visibly scared of more than once. There were grabbed mics, shared wine bottles and whole lotta bouncing around. My memories deteriorate even more rapidly at this point but I know it was fucking awesome.

Almost as soon as the show ended a deadly fatigue fell upon me, I felt half dead. My arms were falling off from pushing against the ceiling. Matt had disappeared. Me, Tommy and Geo stumbled to a bus stop, got some pizza and I gave myself heartburn eating too fast and was still drunk enough to think my life was in danger from the pain in my chest so we trudged back towards Geo's and I felt like a soldier returning from the front in a Wilfred Owen poem and I had to call my girlfriend to tell her that I was most fucking definitely going to die but that BTMI were amazing and what more fitting swansong than that blurry wordless shout of camaraderie and intoxication.

But I lived, we got to Geo's and passed out and woke up the next day and after a breakfast beer headed out. Tommy was catching the bus down to London and I had a train booked so it meant I wandered around Manchester for a few hours in a daze. Found a bright yellow Dickies single in a ramshackle old second hand shop for a couple of quid, had a disappointing baked potato (how can you fuck up a baked potato?), managed to get roped into giving some money to charity by a friendly chugger, there should be some sort of sign so that when you give money to one of those people 100 yards down the road another one with an equally worthy cause doesn't jump out at you and think you're the same heartless bastard that everyone else is when you skirt by them. "I've already given money to one charity today" somehow makes you sound like even more of a scrooge than just blanking silence. I realised as my wallet was dangerously light as I caught the train still feeling fucking rough and I sat there unable to concentrate on the book I was reading and thinking about what I was trying to say to Jeff about the music he made and whether I'd actually managed to communicate it or in my drunkenness had just burbled like a twat.

Because I was trying to make a more specific point than the one I outlined above, I think, because BTMI aren't singing some vague abstract unhappiness, some epic sweep of universal emotions, they're singing MY unhappiness and my friends' unhappiness, our mundane shitty jobs, our overly expensive degrees, our futures heralded by doomladen headlines, our isolation and self-doubt.

My life has gotten better than it ever has been before this year, but it still fucking sucks a lot of the time, I had to move back in with my mum and dad, I have a dead-end job that frustrates, enrages and depresses me, my girlfriend lives thousands of miles away and we keep being stupid and running up huge phone bills, I have no money most of the time, I'm in thousands of pounds worth of debt for a degree I dropped out of, and yeah, more often than I should I still fall into those recursive cycles of self-loathing that have plagued me for the best part of the past decade (and helped me get into punk rock) but hearing those stresses and worries put into words gives me a feeling of validity, like I'm not just a toothless spinning cog, like I'm part of something, like my experience and existence is worthwhile somehow, and it makes me feel kinda good about it, because to shine the light of art on something is inevitably to romanticise it somewhat, like Bukowski making skidrow whisky binges and cheap women sound like the fine and good pursuits of a noble tragic hero. The very act of making art about something makes it more feel better than it felt before because it makes you feel less alone. There's a Jake Burns interview where he talks about the revelatory moment of realising the Clash were singing about their lives on their first album, crap jobs and drunken weekends and garages and condoms, and that before that he'd been singing about California highways and other such hoary rock clichés because that was what he thought rock bands were supposed to sing about. That notion of a band singing sharp evocations of the very lives of the dumb fucks bouncing about in front of them combined with what I was trying to communicate about the implicit beautiful dissonance in a punk rock chorus pretty much adds up to what punk rock pretty much is for me.

Because I know that laying any sort of dogma onto punk rock is pretty much to shackle and restrain the very nature of the beast that makes it so appealing, the formlessness and uncertainties of its ideological make-up that makes it make sense to a lot of us rolling from bad decision to bad decision, too fucking snotty and full of piss and vinegar to adhere to some overall guiding commandments, but it's always gotta have something to do with the idea of an underclass to me. Not necessarily as a classic political concept, and not necessarily the idea of an underclass rising up murderous and righteous with pitchforks and slogans, though I love songs that deal with the advocation of revolution, or the shots taken at presidents and prime ministers or the rocks thrown through police car windscreens, but I'm talking here just about the sort of people who exist outside what is supposed to matter to (the possibly equally slippery notion of) mainstream society. The inherent outsiders, the ones who at some point in the past broke from the pack in their head, who heard a howl and it felt like a kiss, who embrace a wrongness, a loathing, a yearning that can somehow only be truly captured in a form that will be ignored and dismissed for its noise and speed and sloppiness, who hung on to all that teenage desire and angst and built a fortress out of it against the steady erosion of career objectives and blank home comforts. So while a song that tears down the police state or consumerist culture can be a great, a fucking fun song, an irresistible seductive vision, the ones I love more are the songs that just take a shitty little life and shine a fiery light upon its warty beauty, its contradictions and conflagrations, and I love it on a personal visceral fucking level, because I've got a shitty little stressful life, but in these noisy songs and in these connections forged through these noisy songs there is the notion that our lives are part of a secret history, an undercurrent of fuck-ups, a conspiracy of the marginalised and offbeat, a secret scene, the failures and the weirdos, awaiting silent Trystero's empire of dirt and ragged ripped-off Hickey riffs (Hickey are the best band ever). We're the oddballs struggling with our problems, with the constraints that have been placed upon us, stuck into us, and armed in these struggles with the tools and weapons and shields of bouncing souls, lawrence arms, paintboxes and black flags, ceremonies of crimped shrines and bent outta shape guitar wolves. That combined with the previous notion I tried to articulate about the brilliance of singing along to something that is not conventionally lauded yet resonates deeply with you anyway explains why Bomb the Music Industry! are an integral part of that toolset, that coping noise for me and for a lot of other people. They're something special, special enough that they're doing something that means that I felt drunkenly comfortable enough to alter the words in the chorus of one of the songs to more accurately reflect my situation, special enough that they have enough skill to not just implicitly invoke all of the aforementioned tensions and joys, but to lay it out clear and bold in a riotous roadtrip of a song like Syke! Life is Awesome! Which really shouldn't work. It's tough enough to write a song that dances with the contradictory themes of loving life and hating yourself in one moment, but to write one which specifically chronicles a journey from despair to epiphanous delirium and happiness without it coming off as glib or overly corny is tough as shit.

In London I stumbled about a bit more, still dazed and feeling like I'd been run over last night. The nap and the beer and the big shit on the train had not contained the restorative powers I had hoped them to. I wandered round Camden and met Tommy again in the pub above the venue where we nursed pints tenderly. BTMI! came into the pub and swiftly avoided us, or at least that's what it looked like to us. "Oh shit. What did we do last night?" was what we immediately thought, but it turns out they'd just been confused and looking for how to get into the venue, and we hadn't accidentally shat in their van or something horrendous the previous night. After directing Jeff into the venue and supping our pints quietly and stiffly for a little longer, we bumped into some other friends and went into the venue.

First up were The Working Dead, who were a solid little punk band. Good stuff. I should've bought a demo but was pretty broke by this point.

Next on the stage were Bad Ideas, and I could not fathom why they were playing this show, maybe there comes a point where every punk fan encounters something within the punk scene that makes him go "Well, that's not fucking punk rock." and Bad Ideas played this mid-tempo radio-friendly emo-influenced boredom rock that I guess is the logical endpoint of the dulling of the once-ragged edge of AM! and Gaslight Anthem. Second artist syndrome, we meet again. They were boring and lifeless, there was not a hint of noise or fun apart from a brief break between the turgid numbers where someone could be heard to exclaim "But they're shit!" to whoever was next to him followed by an exasperated screech of "Shut the fuck-up!" It was like an entire family sitcom condensed into two lines of dialogue. Bad Ideas sounded to me almost exactly like the band that Jack Black's ex-bandmates form without him in School of Rock that win the competition but not the hearts of the crowd, they're probably destined to get fucking huge and be put on valentine's day mixes for couples who think they're edgy because they owned a RATM album when they were 15 and got the same tattoo that their mum did.

Cynics, who encompassed not one but two punk rock naming conventions, the eschewing of a 'the' before a plural name (Fleshies, Dead Kennedys, Mixtapes) and giving a full band name for just one person (Mischief Brew, Wingnut Dishwasher's Union, uh, Bomb the Music Industry!) and performed a few decent punchy originals and fun covers and is destined to forever be compared to Billy Bragg by dint of the fact that he plays solo with an electric guitar. He also tried to pick a fight with the Bad Ideas heckler, presumably out of solidarity, but it just came across weirdly. Maybe the fact that it seemed weird to me betrays a lack of appreciation of the notion of punk unity, and I know the it must be tough not to stand up for your friends' shit art, but Bad Ideas dealt with the heckler well with a wry smile, they don't need someone picking a fight on their behalf, let them become culturally irrelevant millionaires in peace.

So while I stood and slowly drank through these bands, I fucking ached. Standing up had made me realise just how completely fucked-up I still was from last night, my morning headache had dispersed but that feeling of dislocation, of being just a little bit removed and spaced-out was full within me, and all my limbs tore at their skin, my organs rumbled and my bones creaked. I was an old, old man. As Bomb the Music Industry! took the stage I knew that this was not gonna be good, as much as I love this band I was just too physically shattered from the previous night's adventures to truly connect tonight.And then they started playing and everything that I've been trying to articulate here about how much they mean to me and how much punk rock means to me was visited upon this dank basement a fucking hundredfold as the crowd burst into flailing burning dancing that continued for the entire set. The adrenaline kicked in and I sang along to every word and flailed with them. We moved like those breakneck ska-punk anthems were wired to our nerves and muscles. We crowdsurfed and stagedived. We circled the pillar that stands in the middle of the room. We stumbled about like zombies during the slower numbers, gasping for breath in the solos. We pinballed back and forth against each other with manic grins on our faces and were consumed in sweat and exhilaration. We knocked each other over. We picked each other up with a tug on the arm and a slap on the back.

A few years ago, I remember being involved in an ongoing post-lecture pub discussion positing the concept of a moshpit as a physical representation of a perfect society, it was world class pub talk bullshit, and as such we spent hours drawing the parallels, in the struggle for position conducted with vigour but without malice, in the way that you always pick up a fallen dancer and support the brief higher aspirations of a crowd surfer with the knowledge that they would do the same for you, in the way that while there is a conceptual for a leader in the band on the stage, you always know that they're one of you, that they've done their time throwing themselves about anonymously in darkened rooms and that they're always just a couple steps away from leaping from the stage and joining the tussle, and various other stretched similarities that seemed vaguely profound through the prism of several Guinnesses and a head full of 19th century political theory. Of course I've been at many a punk show where the crowd has been somewhere away from that ideal, Business shows shows where I've come out beaten shitless by dozens of trad skins with arms like cabers, hardcore shows where one stout thick-necked individual takes it upon himself to walk back and forth across the front of the stage with his head down blindly throwing punches in front of him like a huge clockwork toy, and at the other end, the last AJJ show I was at where some guy tried to start a fight with me for even daring to dance in the vicinity of him and his girlfriend.

Maybe I was drunk, dehydrated or delusional, but this seemed to be a show where everything went right. The pit was enthusiastic in the extreme but its violence was a cathartic joy, not a threat, just an outpouring of happiness and thanks cascading from both the crowd and the band, thanks for soundtracking our shitty little lives, thanks for being here and singing along, showgoers scrambling up onto the stage, band members throwing themselves off it, a process of erosion of the borderline between hero and fan that has always been one of my favourite aspects of punk rock, we're all in this together, everyone here is responsible for the transcendent nature of this moment.

And when after a couple of full band encores Jeff Rosenstock took the stage to play Future 86 by himself, telling the crowd that it was a song about the anxieties of being on tour and wishing you could just settle down as the itinerant lifestyle robbing you of many of the steady pleasures of friends and neighbourhood, but about how that song doesn't mention the friends you make from that lifestyle. Well, as the rest of the band and all the support acts and then swiftly a considerable portion of the crowd joined him on the stage, when you're singing a song like that with dozens of others linked arm-in-arm, a choir of the absolutely knackered and overjoyed, there's not a more perfect demonstration of all the shite I was waffling on about earlier, a life in songs, a song that comes alive with inherent contradictions and EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL AND TRIUMPHANT AND WARM AND SILLY THAT PUNK ROCK IS AND EVER COULD BE. Or at least that's how it felt as the song ended and everyone mobbed Jeff. From the moment they played their first song to when I finally climbed down off the stage and skipped up and out of the venue into the street everything made sense, everything was good. Because whatever the fuck happens, when we're not feeling strong, we grab the mic and we sing the fuck along and we chase those breathless moments up into the cold November night.

NANANANANANANANANNANANANNANANNANANANNANANANNANANNANA...

How To Be Punk Rock

2011-04-21T17:17:00.001+01:00

Argue about who would win in a fight between Kathleen Hanna and Wendy O. Williams. Buy a copy of Aaron Cometbus’ Double Duce and love it then lend it to all your friends who don’t get it and think it’s depressing they live in a shithole and destroy themselves rather than energising and inspiring. Feel weird. Feel alone. Do a weird manic shuffle around your room to World/Inferno until the people downstairs think you’re having an epileptic fit. Start a zine, never put out an issue. Wear dumb shitty clothes and pretend it’s a statement. Make statements and pretend you’re just being dumb and shitty. Learn how to play a bunch of pop-punk songs and forget the words even though there’s only four lines. Give yourself a name like Johnny Fucknuts or Joanie Nutfuck and have no-one call you it. Read Cometbus some more, drill Punk Rock Love is… into your head convinced it’s the most perfect piece of writing ever and then actually fall in love and it’s nothing like that at all but it’s still pretty goddamn amazing even if she doesn’t share your appreciation for the finer subtleties of mid-90s chicago punk. Connect with a bunch of sarcastic oddballs on the internet who live hundreds or thousands of miles away. Fuck your throat up when you’re drunk trying to sound like the guy from Dangers. Sound like an idiot when you’re down and trying to sound like Billy Bragg. Know exactly where punk started and where it started for you. Self-mythologise, self-deprecate, get bored and write songs about getting bored. Like Black Flag. Spend money you don’t have on vinyl. Get irked by metalheads. Crush on someone who’s dead now. Learn what anarcho-syndicalism is. Whisper 'me' to yourself when Jello Biafra ask "Who's that kid at the back of the room?" in In-Sight. Be cynical. Get angry. Get most the jokes in Nothing Nice to Say. Research the ones you don’t. Get wasted at a boring sXe hardcore show. Stand sober at the back of a Beerzone show because you just can’t get into it right now and you take the bus home worried that maybe you’re falling out of love with punk rock and what the fuck are you gonna do now. Hear a BTMI! song 12 hours later and laugh because it still means so so fucking much. Know what BTMI stands for. And CBGBs. And ACAB. And you. Get jealous that you’re too broke to go to Fest. Dance in the backrooms of pubs and in house shows and fall over and get picked back up. Misalign your headbanging and crack heads with the guy in front of you by accident so later you’re not sure if the sheer fucking awesomeness of the band blew you away or if you’re just mildly concussed. Get annoyed by hippies. Get annoyed by punks. Love them all anyway. Be stupid. Be smart. Scour blogs for new bands. Throw them at people until a couple stick. Have a favourite Jawbreaker album. Have a favourite Clash song. Fetishise duct-tape. Have a favourite Ramone. Have it be Dee Dee. Lament that you were born too late, be happy you were born right when you were. Build something. Burn it down. Stomp through the ashes until they billow up and get caught in your throat like a Cock Sparrer song so you fall to your knees retching and coughing and tears streaming from your face and all your friends laugh at you, drink a glass of water. Feel a little better. Feel a little better. Feel a little better. Do none of this shit apart from maybe the last one every time you play one of those songs, those songs, the ones written by the same sort of twat that you are.