Steel Chains - Demo 2015 CS

Choppy poppy punk, running along like a pumped-up version of Screaming Sneakers's Violent Days, half-wistful guitar lines cutting across the songs, with a similar melodic bellow to The Gateway District teasing the most out of the lyrics about difficult routes through life strewn with broken ties and solid mistakes, and the stubborn persistence and ultimate reaffirmation that eventually flowers in the wake of these lessons learnt hard. "Things have been tough and/Things have been strange/There have been horrors, and we know by/And we know" as Instincts says.

A Giant Dog - Bone LP

Thick full-throated poppy-punk. Soaring Gateway District kinda vocals over chunky indie-punk riffs, cleaned-up garage tear. Galloping into the album with the drawl of All I Wanted: "All I ever wanted was you anywaaayy", chuntering on in songs like the anguished Cleveland Steven, "WOKE UP IN THE HOSPITAL THE PAIN WAS BLINDING WHITE!" , the shimmy of The Grand with its harmonica snatches, the soar of Another World "Toniiiight... is not your niiight!", the country bummer of Ghostcest that gets into the blues and then dances and shakes out of them, the rock chomp of Teasin' Ass Bitch. The sort of stuff that could get huge, smooth and slick as it is, with so many catchy lines, killer vocals, deadly choruses.

The Modern Pets - Sorry, Thanks LP

Punchy jumpy punk rock from Genrmany, kicking hard and rockin and rollin'. Snappy tunes of Exploding Hearts/Tranzmitors/Buzzcocks power-pop, new-wave warbles, those disaffected dry vocals. From the bleary scumbag snap of Pilsator ("AGAIN YOU WOKE UP IN THE DIRT/"FUCK OFF!" IS THE LAST THING YOU'VE HEARD/ALL YOUR GOALS AND TRIES ARE JUST FOR VAIN...") cutting between simple key lines, guitar scrambles, handclaps, to the corpsing joy of Funeral Fun ("YOUR EYES ARE FULL OF JOY/SEEING ME IS BETTER THAN TV/NOT MY FAULT THAT YOU WEAR BLACK/NOW THERE'S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN GET BACK") and the choppy up-and-down ah-fuck-it skitter of I'm Not a Brick, with its whirlwind bass dances, its spinning-dizzily chorus, its fastpop jab: "IT'S ALL PART OF THE COSMIC JOKE". Catchy kicks and stupid fucks. Fuck work (Clocked Assholes), fuck the media (News), fuck me and my dumb mouth (The Walking Contradiction), fuck internet popularity contests (No Access) and above all, fuck not dancing, fuck not shaking it. It's the sort of album where you think they're gonna throw in the word 'baby' at the end of every line, even when they don't.
 

Dishpit - 7"

Scrappy squeaky dirtpunk from Dishpit, a band made up of members of Empire Builder who put out an absolutely fantastic demo a couple of years ago and then quickly disintegrated. Six reckless punk songs, in the fashion of Twat Sauce, Driller Killers or the Los Canadians/Chickenhead split. All that regionrock punk rock that battles with itself, pulls at its own visible stitches, quickly self-destructing sloppy poppunx scratches with the texture of an old splintery wood floor and the rhythm of bikechains coming loose on hillbombs.

Remnants of similarly sloppy scrappy punx forebears abound. There's the nowheresville bummer of Hickey's The Only Lesbian in Tulsa, Oklahoma and the cramped geography of The Lazer or Cleveland Bound Death Sentence, parking lots and shortcuts between shit jobs and shit punkhouses, in the clatterpop of Stupid Parties. Throughout you have the close crash and jump of the first three Future Virgins seven inches. Maybe bits of real early Screeching Weasel, like Raining Needles or Can't Stand Myself, where it's just primitive speedsnot, words coming in a muddy frustrated rush, on Super America's breathless everything's-shite rattle.

There's Dishpit Anthem, a Pete Jordan bounce, dancing with yelps and whoa-ohs, Geno's, a song about how a sandwich place sucks that also manages to to be a song about cops suck ("for every shitty cheesesteak made there's someone still not loving police"), The Scrabble Song's sweet self-doubt and desire over coffee and board games, the mixed-up letters and mixed-up emotions, all this thrown together in the Borrible-heart amalgam of Forever Punk.

Forever Punk is, like last year's Hunx and his Punx album Street Punk, invested in reclaiming the punx pride/punx unity singalong shouts from the hands of oldfuck lumpen punk rock and roll, returning them to the grasping hands of young fuck-ups. "Still working fuckin beets/still hating the police/still just wandering around/fuckin' off in any town with the same old crowd". An affirmation of the path chosen, Op Ivy's Jaded with more venom, not beautiful because beauty's overrated and untouchable, but just here, still here, a misfit community in rickety working order, "SO UP THE PUNKS/OFF THE PIGS/AND I'LL COME VISIT YOU IF YOU COME VISIT ME".

These are the sort of throwaway songs that will endure longer than any art that's sturdy and built to last, cos these marginal nothings, these petty hates and spittle-glued loves are the real shit that swamps your days, not the widescreen wideshots of bigger picture politics, epic romance, but the dumb little punx uglies and their bent busted communions. I got this seven inch with a homemade button made from a ringpull, a bottlecap and a safety pin and Dishpit are the sound of tiny discarded objects pulled together. They are ephemeral and concerned with little things, the personal lives of people who know too many oogles but aren't really one themselves, who can't quite explain to their mum exactly why they hate cops so much, who laugh hard at their own bad decisions as soon as they've stopped punching a wall over them, who get a tad faded on fumes throwing up a wonky Gauze tag under the bridge, and get chased out of abandoned buildings. Who stay forever punk, in these songs, and in mushy mispelt zines, broken tapes, in stained and sleeveless homemade Die Kreuzen shirts strewn about on dirty floors. Not rebel souls, nothing so romantic or pure, just the brief grotty freedom of small punx lives drawn in sticky, pokey punk rock. To get stuck in your head and to poke at your ramshackle hopes. To get under the skin and live in your itchings.

Caves - Betterment

This album starts with silence, longer than usual, then you hear it, the sounds of a band walking into a studio and setting themselves up, the little creaks and shuffles before they get stuck in. Then they begin figuring out a riff, this slightly bent and battered thing that they lock down and then mirror in doubletime and the vocals kick in: "I don't care! I don't care! Go fuck yourself." That's this band at their best, casually direct lyrically, soaring vocally, ramshackle and runaway musically.

Caves have that straining, that repetitive distended skid dragged forward by the dynamic bellow of the vox, that slap against the music, rather than playing with them. Everything aches, everything is shot in deep and held just long enough to break upon the fringes of discomfort.

Caves play a bit like a less burnished RVIVR, moving with a similar pop-punk cascade, bits of brightness amongst the dust. Fortunately they avoid the go-nowhere momentum-stealing plodders of the RVIVR album, but they do fall victim to another classic pop-punk misstep: acoustic songs. ACOUSTIC. I've come to see acoustic songs on punk albums the same way as skits on hip-hop albums, sometimes okay, often skippable, colouring the album's aural texture, as a rule more bearable when they're about crime rather than fucking. Here at least it's pleasingly awkward, retaining a certain sharpness, but acoustic songs just feel like a naked play for feeling that this album doesn't need.

Theyre's so much already here, in the fuzzrumble and ghostcalls on <3 Koala or Rubino's nervy tumbledown energy, the vocals intercutting desperate/snotty. The crashing up-ended love song of Build Against, "Sometimes, sometimes leaving is hard." The bluntness of Babyccino ("Feelings, no-one cares about your feelings/No-one cares when you need to make a change") and it's shivering feedback runout. The wallop of Ender, which Belushis its acoustic intro to bits and gets huge. It's an album of messily built music, full of gravelly bass and slippery sweet guitar lines, solidly stated emotions run aground, pain dealt with, softer more perfect moments embraced when they can be, punk rock reaching forward, towards betterment.

The Love Triangle - Clever Clever

Rumbling propulsive 77 punk punch. There are bits of power-pop smoothness, bits of garage-punk snot, closest in make-up maybe to straight-up punk bands like The Pigs or The Radiators, all those little first wave hangers on cranking out jumpy punk runarounds, or KBD soulpunk flashes like The Law's Hole in my Heart, in terms of more modern bands, it recalls stuff like the Exploding Hearts and their throwback rock and roll edge, but while bands like that are built more around the jab and itch of the guitar, Clever Clever for the most part tumbles along in the wake of the throb of the bass, scampering this way and that, hitched to the low-end. Yeah there are aggressively infectious guitar lines like on the vituperous Just You Wait  ("Just you wait til I get cancer!"), or the suave spikepop of The Wait, the grubby needling of Swift Exit, but really this album feels meaty and blocky in its construction, feels deep and gutsy and bolted confidently to its own engine.


The Wait, Just You Wait, the chug and pump of I'm Still Waiting for the Buzz, tension infects this album, the songs woundtight and cramped, pushed together and ready to snap, ready to spool out with snaking chaos, degrade and roll over the hill sad and old, like the promises of Just You Wait and Be Old Soon, it's an album aware of what lays ahead, so it crackles and dances with what life it has now.


It still slows down now and then, I'm Still Waiting for the Buzz, the dragged out cynicism of Hollywood Sleaze, the chilledout fuck it of The Situation is Excellent  ("Are we living in the end times?/Have a drink and take a rest") and those are nice change-ups, but when this album really hits its full pace, on Tangle or Future Tense or others, there's nothing like it.

Dancepunk does not mean what it could mean, it means all new-wavey stuff, cleaned-up funk-punk, echoes of Gang  of Four and what not, art and keyboards and disco shine, which can be cool, can be a good time, but then it leaves me struggling to put words to the physical sensation of Clever Clever. But maybe that's a good thing, shutting off one linguistic alley makes you scramble and search for a new one, a more refined descriptor to pin into the music. Dancepunk, what it could mean are these sort of wriggly Lurkers-lumped punk rock numbers, that shuffle and step quickly and purposefully, that move like you want to move, that pull you out of yourself with every tossed-off riff or bass turn or drum shiver, punk for dancers. Move yourself to this beat, pop like a broken bass-string, find yourself, draw yourself, make yourself, punk melodic and guitar frantic.

On Static Shock records.

Cremalleras - s/t

Buzzfast punked-up two-piece thrashpop from Mexico. Curt punk songs that rattle around and hit with the quick crack of a dislocated joint being thwacked back into place. One of the first words I used to describe the band was 'zippy' and upon googling, turns out that Cremalleras is Spanish for 'zippers', much as I would like to take credit for some Joycean multilingual pun, I am not that smart, they just named their band well. From those sharp rising aaaahs on Ex-Novios and the shakearound shuffle of En Todos Lados to the rise and fall rumble of No Me Importa and the burntout caterwaul of Todo Esta Perdido, these songs pop with thin venom, danceable as much as they are aggressive, seducing and shimmying as much as they spit and crash, built from stark snippets of rough punk and sweet bouncy guitar thrum. On Cintas Pepe records.

Direct Hit! - Brainless God

tense fucking shit when a band whose logo you have decided to etch indelibly into your skin decides to release new music. I don't have to worry about the Hickey H on my leg as that band are dear departed, but having already dodged the Screeching Weasel bullet, no-one wants to join the group of people who got Gaslight Anthem tats after Sink or Swim, or got Anti-Nowhere League jobs before The Perfect Crime came out (though to be honest, an Anti-Nowhere League tattoo was always gonna be somewhere in the top ranks of bad decisions from moment needle hit skin). So I was kinda on edge for one of my favourite bands' new album.

Selfie of the Artist as a Young Dog

And it got worse when I heard a couple of the preview tracks and they sounded pretty slick. Slick, as in well-produced. I generally try not to harp on about production, because focusing on production in punk reviews it always just the most boring shit ever and generally seems like a transparent attempt on behalf of the writer to go "Oh look how mature I'm being knowing that music is something made by people in rooms." Fuck that, music is numinous adolescent shit for dancing to and crying over, I will treat it as sillily and ridiculously and pretentiously as I possibly can.

But yeah it sounded kinda slick, and slick is a word I only like to use when I am giving a nickname to a greaser that I have beef with in the musical that is my everyday life, and combined with the fact that I was not too into Domesplitter (I love all those songs, I'm just generally not down with rerecordings if they don't alter the song significantly in someway like Proxy's Police Car's development from demo to 7", OG KEASBEY 4 LYFE) I was definitely worried. Maybe it was just use of the words 'first date' in the song Buried Alive, the song I heard first, that brought up memories of First Date, one of Blink-182's most Blink-182 songs, and I'm just not really into that anymore.

What I did not see coming was that the song Buried Alive was not just a throwaway goofy love song, but a serial killer section of a greater narrative, a concept album about the end of the world, and not in like the way that d-beat albums are about the end of the world ("YEAH WE'RE DISPEPSIA AND WE SING ABOUT ALL THE TOPICS: NUCLEAR WAR, NUCLEAR WINTER, WAR NUKES, NUCLEAR BOMBS, NUCLEAR ARSENALS, NUCLEAR SUMMERS, FISSION-POWERED NUCLEAR ROBOT DOGS") but a collection of songs telling, from a bunch of criss-crossing perspectives, the tale of the eschaton immanentized. In this sense the full wider sound of it all apt, a big sound for a big story, works, an angelic sheen for songs of angels descending, like the way Shitlickers layered guitars like a motherfucker to get that end-of-the-world blast on their raw punk d-beat classics, but put to shinier, brighter purpose in big lifting pop-punk swells.

One thing it doesn't focus on too much though is the mechanics of that destruction, there are a bunch of references to bombs falling, but the album's focus is on consequences not causes, humans (not just humanity) faced with the nothingness rushing towards them, not the blundering brinkmanship or nationalist posturing that brought the curtain down. It's a story that works on a few levels. There seems to be something of a throughline, that you can kind of work out but it's shady and hinted at and uncertain. The main thing is a bunch of people confronting an end, maybe the end, a personal as well as a wider one. On & On and The World Is Ending (No-One Cares) open with a couple of overviews of the situation, one screamingly defiantly against the black ("LET'S GET PLASTERED ONE MORE TIME!"), the other a snotty righteous putdown of sinners. That's the first hint of this albums multi-pronged approach to armageddon, coming in from different angles, stuff like Buried Alive and Getting What He Asked For are third person. Bank of Elevators, White Robes, Back to the Tower and more are first-person, but from different characters.

A lot of the songs fit together in pairs like that. Buried Alive are both macabre stories of violent lives facing armageddon, one a serial killer, one an avenging victim of domestic violence. Buried Alive is a weird one, somewhere close to parodic and blackly comic, but with enough specificity and real emotion to give it consequence, and of course set up against that rushing doom that shoots up the tension in all. It's that uncertainty and switching up of viewpoints and tones, ghostly forgiveness, dark irony, drawn-out relief, that prevents it falling into that sort of cloying cutesy serial-killer stuff of bad 'adult' dramas and Hannibal Lecter twitter accounts.

Getting What He Asked For might be sharper in its cut off, more sudden, the righteousness gets shit on but the selfish evil of Buried Alive doesn't. What really gets closure here? The song's asking something brutal. Can even the cunt in Buried Alive taste redemption? Can even the victory of GWHAF's protagonist get stolen out of from under them. The last line screams "It's not so fucking depressing" but I'm not sure if that's true. It certainly thrills fore it snaps apart whereas Buried Alive just makes you feel weird, but it's a testament to the sequencing of this album that the pairing of these songs makes each other stronger, more complex, playing off each other in the different applications of murder, the different feel of the end hitting, with some uncomfortable stuff to say about the possible pointlessness of it all.

The idea of a brainless or absent deity has echoes of Garth Ennis's Preacher or Chronicles Wormwood, of maybe the heavenly detour of Angels in America. It's a rage at absences, at irresponsibility from those entrusted with it the most. It works on an anti-god trip, but even on the level of someone who's never bought into that line when they weren't high as hell and depressed watching What Dreams May Come at 4am it seems like a great rage to be a part of, that scream against the idea that things are ultimately fucked, meaningless, out-of-control, that we were lied to, cos we were, by someone. It's something somewhat like a soaring chorus for those days when you get so fucked off with the world that you end up daydreaming that that shit was real just so shitty people would go to hell when they die.


It is also wordy as hell. This might be the first album I've reviewed where the word count of the lyrics has a shot at outreaching the word count of this review (we'll see about that, ya cunts). Cos it jumps around with the perspectives you end up with a lot of different character songs sung in the voices of angels or suicides or desperate lovers. The characters are well drawn through dialogue, lines packed with nice natural bleed and softness to the language, words imbued with caginess and euphemism, the edges fraying with litotes and couching language. "It's kind of awkward to admit that I've been less than forthright when I implied that I was ready to die" on I Told You a Lie scuffs with shamefaced admittal. The sort of non-commital bureaucratic coaxing on Bank of Elevators, about a a dead soul facing damnation, or purgatory or pressganging into heaven's service. "When you’re done, see me here and we’ll discuss compensation – If there’s something I can say, it’s we’re especially patient." It leads to a lot of cleverly structured Sloppy Seconds double rhymes, cluttered torrential slaps of words, enjambement running over.

It's cool but it's weird for a band that tends so clearly to the anthemic to construct songs of such lyrical density, it means that when I saw them I spent like 3 days listening to the songs intently trying to learn the words and then just got too drunk/excited to remember all but the choruses, and even a bunch of the choruses do that thing where they change up with each one.

There's an Auld Lang Syne style refrain that comes up a couple of times through the album, drawing that choral flourish of ending and loss and rebirth into this punkpopalypse dance. Cos there's a lot of denial in this album, as much as there is acceptance, a lot of bargaining and and ugly discomfort and threads-left-hanging as much as there is conclusion. The messiness and contradictory nature of this album is what makes it. Sometimes joyous, sometimes hateful, sometimes despairing, sometimes all these things and more smashing into each other. Sometimes the end seems meaningless and arbitrary, sometimes it throws everything that matters into stark relief and then on I Told You A Lie it even acknowledges the idea of setting lives against the situation in that fashion and the way that that's probably not a very smart way or helpful to frame things "In fact the truth is I've only used this to understand why we're all here." It escapes and dodges away from easy answers. It's a conflicted album, sonically, thematically, silky whoa-ohs fly into angry barks. Heaven is a Black Hole, a song that reverberates with sweet harmonies and heavenly echoes still has a stumbling moment of indecision where it all shudders to a stop in the middle. It can switch between silly-sweet classic Steinwaysesque buzzpop lines like "Cause in a minute we'll be isotopes all jumbled up/Doesn't that give you some hope that we can end up together?" on White Robes to searing pain on We're Fucked.

We're Fucked, a straight up hardcore rippper, like their split with Hold Tight!, burning with the fury of betrayed suicides. If more pop-punk bands are gonna start throwing hardcore bangers into their stuff (like how RVIVR did earlier this year of The Hunger Suite Part II: Dark Territory) then I'm down with it, more pop-punk bands should forget they're not Die Kreuzen for a minute and a half and punch holes in the glistening wings of the anthems with a bunch of screaming anger in the middle of the album, bursting with pain and voidborn rage, "We'll pluck out your eyes so they won't see the end/We'll box out your ears so they can't hear the end". This fury is brought-up again at the end of I Told You A Lie which shifts gears from a mid-tempo crooner into a panicked rush that leads into the confident punch of Home To You which slams straight into a dramatic bomb blast.

And then the end. The end of all these endings. How can you do that? Such an intricate chaotic thing, swirling with brawling boxed-out emotions, what seem like possibly dozens of stories, all hinting at dozens, hundreds, thousands more. Packed as much with bleakness and anger as it is with romance. Like I said, there's a narrative here, buried and cut up like its characters, obscured and tricky to unpick but that's unimportant ultimately, being secondary to the flux of human feeling that pours from every song in every different way. How can you sum all that up with one big closer? Well, it ends with a song about fucking up angels. Yeah, maybe it's kinda easy to bring everything all into one fantastic upwards tear, a shining coming together of all the twisted broken souls streaming, smiling and violence in their hearts, towards the gates of heaven, but the wide warm singalong of lines "WE WANT OUT WHISKEY BOTTLES BACK NOW/OUR GUITARS AND AMPLIFIERS/COS THIS NIGHT AIN'T OVER TIL WE SAY IT'S DONE!" grab everytime as it rolls back seamlessly into a reprise of the similarly joyous and unrepentant On and On. It an album built of endings, painful ones, triumphant ones, sudden ones, that goes up against the finality and futility of it all but can't help but loop back in on itself in an endless humane and life-filled continuation of the fuck-yous and the get-pumpeds that runs like a river on, communal and victorious, vicious and companionless, making you lose the idea that it's some tense, really

RAMONA

Probably the greatest song ever written about the Ramones is R.A.M.O.N.E.S. by Motorhead, originally on the album 1916, later covered by the Ramones themselves, which rolls through, with vision and thunder, a flash of images of the Ramones urban knucklehead milieu: “Black leather, knee-hole pants/Can't play no highschool dance”

Then there's Guitar Wolf, who bite the styles of Motorhead and the Ramones in equal measure, Japanese noise superheroes in black leather, everything louder than everything else, cramming words together in a sort of impressionistic punk rock fuck you, where you can tell exactly what they mean, but also are incapably of explaining exactly what they’re saying, heirs to the ultimate cool of the Ramones, black leather jackets and simplicity, crunching out the surf-garage throb of the song Kung Fu Ramone Culmination Tactic.

Ramones tributes often come at their subject from the same sort of angle, with the same sort of shimmy, careening around in a 100mph coming together of that black leather, ripped up jeans, speed and noise, jukebox romance, communal shouts of the backpatch-cool stupidity slogans "GABBA GABBA HEY!" and "HEY! HO! LET'S GO!", an emphasis on the Ramones as a combination of teen heartthrobs, dangerous herberts and cretinous goobers. And an overwhelming desire to be joined with them somehow, to imitate, to hang with that crew, like on The Migraines I Wanna be a Ramone, which packs 40-odd Ramones references into its 3 minutes, going deep beyond the pinheads and the beaten brats, managing such lyrical feats as rhyming Mama's Boy with Animal Boy. There are also at least three other songs with the same title.  

A similar desire for assimilation exists on I Wanna Be Like Dee Dee Ramone by The Parasites. “I Wanna Be a Blitzkrieg Bopper/Wanna Be a Real Punk Rocker.” It's pleasingly reckless in its fuzz and scramble, but it does have the problem of focusing wholly on the punk rebel icon at the expense of the series of life experiences that defined Dee Dee, The Parasites never mention their desire to be a rentboy in 70s New York, have a lifelong heroin addiction, play in GG Allin’s band or release an unbelievably bad rap album that demonstrates all the flow and lyricism of a cartoon moose on barbiturates.

 The Spazzys have the song I Wanna Cut My Hair Like Marky Ramone, about wanting to cut your hair like Marky Ramone, but acknowledging "It's gonna look dumb, but it's gonna be fun." For the Spazzys, they don’t care if it means they can’t get a boyfriend, looking like Marky is way more important. A shitty momcut as being part of something greater, cheap self-mutilation to join the cult. Kinship with this group of impossible freaks.

 This is in the subgenre of songs specifically about minor Ramones. Generally the songs that focus on the Ramones revolve around the main core of Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee, Tommy, Richie, CJ and Marky kinda gets kicked to the curb or just short shout outs, though there is Tommy Ramone by The Vapids, a two minute biography that follows their first drummer from his awkward teenage years, "TROUBLE ALL AROUND!" is its repeated refrain. Elvis doesn't even get one song to my knowledge, but then again he only played two shows, whereas Marky was in the band for 12 years and even gets the indignity of usually being left off the iconic logo shirt in favour of Tommy. (Also, when the Ramones covered R.A.M.O.N.E.S. they changed the lyrics from “Hear Marky kick some ass” to “Marky takes it up the ass”)

Even Kung Fu Monkeys' I Miss the Ramones has to add "Let’s not forget Marky!" almost as an afterthought. I Miss the Ramones was penned around the Ramones break-up, serving as  framing them in a larger cultural narrative, running through post-war music history from the 50s onwards heralding the Ramones as heroes arriving in the nick of time “to save the day and take back radio” from the turgid indulgence of classic and prog rock. An idea which does have some merit, though the implication that the Ramones were also somehow responsible for exposing the Watergate scandal is probably a bit farfetched.

The Mr T Experience End of the Ramones says goodbye to the Ramones with a transcendent final show, everything coming together for a last 1-2-3-4 where the pang of goodbye is temporarily obscured by the blazing exit in spite of, or maybe because of, the beating life has given the four not-brothers “Joey is a vegetable Dee Dee's going bald Johnny got kicked in the head but the kids still love them all” 

They do and they still miss them. The loss is often palpable. Punk Rock Club RIP is mournful, the passing of a venue where good times were had, the Ramones were seen, friendships were made and jaws were broken, it's as sad as a song that bubblegum can really be and you can read the grieving for a show space as grieving for the Ramones also. Their mention is often punk rock shibboleth, a touchstone, like in The Queers anti-hippie anthem Granola Head, “I’d rather be at home, listening to the Ramones.” or in Screeching Weasel’s I Need Therapy as the painful result of this obsession lamenting the fact that he’s "O.D.'d on The Ramones cause I just sit around at home"

MTX, The Queers and Screeching Weasel being the Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee of the 90s Ramonescore revival, simplistic sharp catchy punk cuts on love and isolation and loss. Buzzpop barbs of that inspired the likes of The Transgressions with Baby I Love You (But I Need Someone to Talk to About the Ramones), in this, as in (The Huntingtons Jeannie Hate the Ramones, and The Creeps My Girlfriend Hates the Ramones) adoration for the Ramones is a relationship acid test. It’s probably Ramones-worship at its most juvenile, which is pretty fucking juvenile in a field which is an endless shambling parade of four-chord arrested development. Stylistically not amazingly interesting, the The Transgressions at least get out in 40 odd seconds of screaming, the Huntingtons and the Creeps rely on a mix of terrific pace and sloppy vocal collisions between dry whoa-ohs and snotty scrapes, to sustain themselves, until the Creeps song gets kinda slower and a bit boring. What it really points too though is that sort of teenage shortsightedness, music taste over all, judgemental punx exclusivity, a ridiculous shiteheaded personal integrity over compromise and happiness. How many people are there out there suffering just cos some girl ain't into. Is it really as common a problem as these bands make out? Similarly dumb but coming from the other directions are The Come Ons with She's Ugly But She Likes the Ramones (though that does put the Spazzys fears of loneliness to rest).

It might be these sort of bands which are put on blast by the goofball iconoclasm of Boris the Sprinkler’s Kill the Ramones released on a double A-side single with the song Kill the Sex Pistols, by a band that clearly loves the Ramones as much as anyone, once recording a whole album cover of the Ramones’ End of the Century. The Ergs! offer a less drastic solution pleading over a ripped off and muddied-up Teenage Lobotomy riff Xerox Your Genitals, Not the Ramones.

Of course, Kill the Ramones was written before the main three Ramones had actually died. Since the end of the century Dee Dee, Joey and Johnny have all bought it. My favourite version of Motorhead’s R.A.M.O.N.E.S. is on the 2005 live bootleg Stagefright where Lemmy introduces the song with a growl of "I was gonna stop doing this song last year, but then another one died, so I had to start all over a fucking again.”

Since then Ramones songs have leant even more towards the mournful, dug further into the loss, it works as well as the kisses and adoration, because the Ramones weren't just about the teenage bounce and gangs, Joey's voice was always capable of an edge of sadness in stuff like Danny Says and She Talks to Rainbows

 Joey Had to Go, a mid-tempo stomper, from Nomeansno ramonescore side-project, The Hanson Brothers, draws a vivid portrait of Joey as a sort of braindead intergalactic traveller, "He couldn't count past four. But he didn't need a whole lot more. He was weird all spindly and tall. Standing in his leathers up against the wall.” an impression probably fostered by their most famous on screen appearance in the Roger Corman classic Rock and Roll High School where the entire band comes across like spaced-out weirdos struggling to grasp the fundamentals of human interaction, Dee Dee endlessly baffled by the prospect of eating a slice pizza. Here Joey’s an alien being passing through, bestowing his wisdom and then he’s gone, more worlds to tear up, more galaxies to get hoppin. 

The Sloppy Seconds, still aren’t at that stage of acceptance yet, with the tightly-rhymed slamdance denial of You Can’t Kill Joey Ramone, “NO! NO! NO! JOEY DON’T GO!” it screams, “Save your prayers for Dee Dee” it pleads.

Not all of the songs deal with love and loss, imitation and destruction, for instance,  Frenzal Rhomb explicate the art/artist division in the song Johnny Ramone was in a Fucken Good Band But He Was a Cunt (subtitled GABBA GABBA YOU SUCK) but that’s an outlier. Most of them get their kicks in romance and pinhead longing.

 The crush of Helen Love’s Joey Ramoney, which portrays a long-distance desire over a sweetly skipping keyboard riff, sampling Joey’s hey-ho’s and running away with its own silly love. “There’s a girl who loves you on the other side of the world” it reassures Joey, perfectly capturing that bedroom-poster closeness you feel towards your teenage idols. Certainly more pleasant than The Maxies’ Sandy with its promise of “For you, Sandy, I’d dig up all the dead Ramones.”

 Amy Rigby’s Dancing with Joey Ramone, is, at least at first, mellow dancefloor seduction, with a possibly spectral Joey, who keeps his distance, as she copies every move he made. On the initial listen you get caught up in the gentle shuffle, and it comes across as resembling the adoration of Joey Ramoney, but on relistens it gets weirder and more aggressive ("I tried to say something/He said "Girl, shut your mouth, they're playing Papa Was a Rolling Stone") and besides, if you're copying every move he makes, Joey Ramone’s main move was leaning forward and looking scary as he shook his head about arrhythmically so really the scene’s less romantic than it might appear. At the end the unreliable narrator finds herself alone, but still stuck with those warm gluey memories as the song suddenly speeds up into Ramones pastiche.

 Sleater-Kinney’s I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone focuses on this heartthrob idea, usurping Joey’s place as an idol, with a rebel yelp. It's equal parts that imitation and destruction. Joey's a god, but one to kill. "I wanna be your Joey Ramone/Pictures of me on your bedroom door/Invite you back after the show/I'm the queen of rock and roll."

Delay’s Everything You Hate brings together that metaphorical power together with the complex interpersonal relationships, the tension and loathing that characterised the band for most of its existence, synthesising their place as icons with their reality as humans. “You say you don’t like the Ramones/But I think we’re a lot like the Ramones/Cos we look good together but we don’t get along/We’re a lot like the Ramones.”

Modern Life Is War's D.E.A.D.R.A.M.O.N.E.S. similarly mixes the reality with the fantasy. It's got that assimilative desire, but it's also from a point in time when the Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee are in the ground so it's way darker and more tortured in its cry of "Now I just wanna go back home and turn up my stereo/Until the rhythm melts my bones 'cause I'm a Dead Ramone"

Shonen Knife, known also as the Osaka Ramones, who have also released full albums of Ramones covers and played entire Ramones cover shows. The song Ramones Forever, tells the tale of a life lived through the medium of Ramones. It’s a simple process that has played out all over the world for the last 35 years. Day 1, hear the Ramones on the radio. Day 2, buy a Ramones album. Day 3. Start a fucking punk rock band. 

 The song triumphantly climaxes with a scene of Shonen Knife supporting the Ramones, which actually happened. This is one of the ultimate attractions of punk rock, that you can start a shitty band in your shitty town and then be sharing the stage with your heroes not long after, but, more than with any other punk band, the Ramones lend themselves to hero worship as much as best-friend fantasies the Ramones are definitely on pedestals. 

The inclusive/exclusive balance, the build-it-up/tear-it-down counterplay, where you can be part of something, you can change your last name to Ramone, but you're not a RAMONE-Ramone. You can wish to obliterate every idol, but you still need heroes somehow, that impossible thing to aspire to. You can get close, but you still got that gap. You’ll never quite be one of those four sloppily uniformed thugs, leant against the wall looking cool, but almost trying too hard to look badass and disaffected and ending up like some weird broken simulacra of teenage cool, all the more desirable for its sliced and mangled take on that languid adolescent pose. The Ramones are gone, whether you think them benevolent aliens or just a bunch of fucked-up dudes from New York, they're gone, but when  Shonen Knife sing “RAMONES FOREVER! MUSIC FOREVER! RAMONES FOREVER! PUNK ROCK FOREVER!” you don't really feel like they are, you feel like they're just around the corner, something eternal and drawn in the stars and much as their etched in brick and scrawled on toilet doors and commemorated in a thousand bad tattoos, a couple hundred sloppy punk rock songs. They meant something, they did something, yo, cuz 13 human beings have walked on the moon, but only 8 have been Ramones.

Not all of these songs are available on youtube, but you can track most of them down somewhere online. For a more complete detailing of songs about the Ramones, see this excellent list which I stumbled across while editing this piece.

Low Culture - Screens

Screens is pop-punk that shrugs off the taint of cleanliness that infects some of that genre, ex-Marked Men/Shang-A-Lang Dirtnap goodness, songs that snap into each other so quickly and sharply that sometimes you think it's just a rhythm shift in one song. Clackety power-pop that often seems to turn on that modern life alienation axis, all medication ("But I can't seem to replace the space that was left behind" on Pills) and distance, the thrum of technology and the croon of separation, like Royal Headache by way of Subhumans songs, or Lost in the Supermarket torn through by the Carbonas.

"I can't keep these demons from crawling in" shouts Nightmare in a full punk tumble, "You say you wanna take me out well take me out" drawls Waste the Day Away. But this focus on emptiness, so perfectly captured in the little trills that burst out of the garage-punk shiver, finding respite on the mellower California with bubbling sunny pop melodies and refrain of "But tonight I'm getting fucked up in California/Drinking whiskey on the beach/And all those kids who were better than me/Well they're probably sitting home watching their TV" This always feels to me like a small album, it's not some all encompassing statement, it's not a blast of noise to rearrange and reconfigure, it's a tight punk picture of some bad stuff and some good stuff, wrapped up in sweet vocal lines and hooky doxologies to our troubles and tenseness and what breaks through.

Worthwhile Way - Love is All

Worthwhile Way, in their new release on ADD Records, do a nice line in sweet skippy Japanese punk-pop that frequently indulges in some folky clicks and country twang along the lines of a cleaner (way cleaner), less fucked-up and raw, Tex and the Horseheads or what The Gateway District did on their first LP stuff like The Highway Song, a bubblegum bounce Pretty Boy Thorson and the Falling Angels, a smoothed out One Man Army. Melodic vocals that dance about, serenading, shouting, sometimes Mayu stopping singing to talk in matter-of-fact kinda way, like it's a quick aside to audience. Highlights include the namesake track and it's sweepalong power-pop, the gentle slowly building twist of Birds Sing, Family Song and its drop outs and high-pitched vocal acrobatics and singalong pep, a version of the folk standard The Frozen Logger that's got a kinda low-rent Jake Thackray rise-and-fall feel to it and a Billy Bragg cover almost as good as Discount ever managed with Northern Industrial Town.

Off With Their Heads - Home

Off With Their Heads have been making great gruff punk rock that combines the horrifying despair that builds and corrodes inside too many of us with the explosion of pop-punk joy for a while now. They've always thrived on that dissonance, the gap, (the beauty between?), the sense of brokenness you feel a lot of the time splitting open into a big soaring chorus of Oi!-caught pain where the anguish is ameliorated not by any particular positive step, but merely by the fact that for this second the loneliness and isolation has been collectivised into a fists-in-air sweatsoaked pit singalongs, shit-off-your-shoulder catharsis.

Home does offer more of the same screaming-in-the-dark for a bunch of it, but it also has some stuff which is straight-up fucking inspirational, Focus on Your Own Family is like a miniature SELF-HELP book bolted to a Rivethead or Banner Pilot or Manix song where all advice starts with "FUCK EM ALL!" and continues "DON'T EVER LISTEN! DON'T EVER COMPLY! NEVER BE SCARED! NEVER BE FRIGHTENED! HOLD YOUR HEAD HIGH!" and the bits of the album with this tone are reminiscent of the sharp edges where Henry Rollins' stuff goes from that tight twitching wireball of brokenbone angst to the nuclear-powered punch-a-mountain-in-the-face fightspiration of a line like "I am ready for whatever's coming. I expect nothing but to be let down or turned away. I am alone. Goddamn. The shit hurts sometimes, but I realize what I am, what I have become." ( I was looking for a particular Rollins line to illustrate my point but I couldn't find it but it didn't really matter as EVERY SINGLE QUOTE IS LIKE THAT!) And that jump out of the tormented blue mess of hard drugs and hospitals and hate songs to that kinda (yeah maybe a little) cheesy yeah-I'm-gonna-live-this-life-and-you-are-too swerve  is all the more powerful from coming for a band that's worn suicide in its lyrics like a studdedpunkvest armour.

That is not to say the screaming in the dark, which still happens on this album, is not a useless thing, not an unimportant thing to do, not fucking relevant.

When I was 18 and living in college accommodation depressed I played Johnny Hobo and the Freight-Trains incessantly, a band whose entire oeuvre was about self-destruction and self-hatred, all the sorts tales of brokendown squatparty awfulness that just in their very existence made me feel less alone because of the way they articulated a bunch of the shit I was stuck on, stuck in, and I carved the chorus to Harmony Parking Lot into the back of my bass-guitar with a penknife and made a typo which I was unreasonably annoyed with myself about. I even loved the almost unlistenable early demo stuff with drum-machines, feeling like shit all the time, it made me feel a little better to know that someone else was feeling like shit all the time too, so when the songwriter Pat the Bunny disbanded the band and tried a more positive tack with his next project Wingnut Dishwasher's Union first came out I was not as into it as it was trying to be more hopeful and I didn’t want to be more hopeful, I just wanted to be miserable and nihilistic with someone else so I didn’t really listen to them that much so maybe Focus On Your Own Family could really run cold with some people, come across as too corny, but the interesting thing about Focus On Your Own Family is that it's soaraway believe in yourself mantra is tucked right in the middle of the album. A less confident band would stick the positivity, the rising empowerment anthem at the end and leave the listener on the upwards finish, throwing you back out with a sense of purpose, but that would be triter and less interesting that what OWTH do, which is constantly switch up in their writhing pain, yeah that'd be to cheapen and diminish the documents of impossible/everyday struggle that populate the rest of this album. Cos there isn't a snap-out-of-it moment with bleak shit like that, there are ups and downs and boy are there downs.

Also, the despair and self-loathing that OWTH have dealt with has usually focused on its application, the loneliness and ache that and the ruined relationships and long scorched-earth nights that result from living in a way where some of the time, or a lot of the time, you feel like you'd got something closer to a spikey rebarred concrete lump for a heart, that if a surgeon opened you up they'd find something closer to the grey-green of the Antikythera mechanism than anything resembling a functional muscle that can sustain life, that could ever be used as a metaphor for love or strength or forbearance by even the most optimistic poet you could find.

And here there is that, of course. There is angry disassociation on SHIRTS: "I don't feel like me/whoever that's supposed to me." There is failure and hopelessness in Nightlife "I know I’m sick and I’m not right. I’m so fucking tired of living this life, I made for myself, I’m sorry that I cannot get past what keeps me away from the light." There is a scary sense of a malicious otherness squatting parasitically inside you, pulling you away from life as it seems to run for other people, drawing a borderline between you and what you might call normal or you might , if one was taking it from one particularly seductive sort of angle, you might call 'good' on Always Alone: "Something inside, you'll never know, keeps me from feeling the things that are so/standard for most but not for me". Resignation on the fading buzz of Stolen Away: "I'm not gonna change after everything I've been through." There is a whole lot of discomfort punk thrust into anthems, rock and roll lovesongs terrified that this love is not enough, and half-crooned bummer numbers (stuff along the lines of their Don't Laugh, I'm Totally Serious from All Things Move Towards Their End) all packed to disintegration with the raw squirming honesty of a teary-eyed teenage livejournal post. Hearts sewn to sleeves with dental floss and circled like an A with Snuggle lyrics.

But as well as those moments when it's just hitting those same present painspots, screaming in the alltime dark, and as well as those moments when it's trying to move up and onwards, attempting to light a way forward, there is another way it moves, there's a  digging for the root, a coming together of an expose of the cause of this ugly wonk shit that lives and gurgles, something they've hinted at that before on songs like Janie, which is rerecorded here, ("This is why I cannot tell you what you deserve to know.").

Here it does take that ("I need to find my way back to where I began. Retrace my steps and start again." on Come Find Me, also a song about not doing it alone, asking for help) and as a result of that backwards interrogation it sometimes it feels tonally close to the harrowing beauty of The Mountain Goats' The Sunset Tree and its searching for some source of the torment and depictions of the intense trauma of growing up in a place where kids should never be made to grow up. It's looking for where this hate and woe got its big break

And in that case here that blame is generally lain at the big-ass wooden door of the church.

Altar Boy Blues probably does it clearest: ("There's only one time around and I choose not to blindly follow the same people that abuse. And I've seen it first hand, they tried to cover it up, I was confused.") but then there's the aforementioned Focus On Your Own Family which is a dig at the nauseating bigots at Focus On the Family, but it's not a scathing attack like something like DK's Moral Majority ("God must be dead if you're alive!") or Amebix's The Church is For Sinners ("The church holds out a bloodstained hand to pass around the hat"), in fact it really doesn't mention those bloviating christknackers at all, just the titular shot, it's a best-revenge-is-living-well kinda deal.

Something of blackhearted pop-punk heathen jolt of Crusades, attacking the consequences most, it's that antireligious spirit free of the smug punchability of people who post Richard Dawkins quotes and Amazing Atheist links on their tumblr (cos while I might agree with Hitchens and his ilk on the basic proposition "There is no god." I'm not down with their addendum "And you have to be a smirking cunt about it."). Attacks on the church not as a point of pride, but as a beatendog biteback at the damage caused, a hate fucking earned, a vicious stab, maybe not so much with personal faith, but with the atrocities it causes and conceals with its structures, when it is codified and socialised, the righteousness that blinds its wearer, convinces them of their goodness as they muck about in some obliterative evil works. I'm writing this as white smoke rises from the vatican and my twitter feed clogs up with pope jokes and my Rudimentary Peni patch burns hot against my punx jacket, so you could say that they're incredibly timely in this, but the truth is, the Catholic church is such an endless procession of vile conceited ignorance and venal hate-garbed boogie-dicks that attacks on their colossal hypocracies have been timely for roughly the last 2000 years.

And not just in the well documented self-serving cover-ups, right in the fucking giddy heart of Catholic doctrine is the weirdo notion of original sin, I mean what sort of fucking person looks at a baby and sees them inherently infected with the badness of the world? I don't believe in heaven but if I did there wouldn't be any sort of equivocation over whether a fucking newborn baby that dies is gonna go there, some shit that the Catholic Church only got done with in two-thousand-and-shitting-seven. I mean, jesus christ. That's the sort of just straight-up view-gnarling philosophy that should be kept the hell away from a developing brain and soul. This album screams "You want a fucking confession?" as Ryan Young's voice snarls and groans and aches as the songs, which are maybe a  little cleaner, a little slower, and the songs constructed in a different kinda way to their earliest fucking classics like Die Young or SOS or Sleeping in Carrie's Car, where they just stick to build-up/race-downhill, crack onwards consistently and punkspeed or chunter determinedly or just scrape painfully down the route like a dying man.

Because above anything else, this is an album which constantly goes against itself, sometimes an atmosphere breaking rocketship love, sometimes a trudge onwards, some, sometimes a nasty little shitwicket moaning alone and uncomfortable and twirling up into itself in misery spirals, sometimes reaching out pleadingly for any sort of help offered. It's  sometimes self-immolation, sometimes an immutable fuck-you punched into brick and poetry. It's not simple. Our moods and convictions don't flow in one direction, don't get simply placed into templates or regular orbits, depression ain't a Freytag Arc, redemption is not a problem to be solved. The only constant on this album, it seems, is movement. Away from something, towards something, escape, return. Always searching. Ever ticking over with the struggles and distance "Always upstream/always against the grain" on Shirts, "Gonna be a rough road/gonna take some time" on Focus On Your Own Family.

"It's a long way back to be anything that anyone could love." is how it's set out on the opener Start Walking. This is an album that gives no clue of when, or if anyone will manage to stop, There's less of a wallow, more of a sense of purpose buts it's a tidal ebb 3 steps forward 2 steps back kinda shuffle as this punk rock tears and rumbles on.

It's a fucking life. Is the home of the title a destination, a place to escape from, or the place we're going towards now? The album can't decide. "Please don't make me go home. I'm wanted less than I'm wanted here." on Don't Make Me Go. "Help me find a home" and those big beautiful whoa-oh-ohs that close out the album on Take Me Out. Maybe it's all those things. "Home" is a odd word in English, it's often a tricky thing to get a student learning the language to remember that you can't 'go to home' (that's what I do in my day job), because when you say "I'm going home" home is an adverb, it's not a place, it's a direction, a qualifier to the action.

Probably the Home Off With Their Heads are running with here is something like Pat the Bunny singing an acknowledgement of confusion on Johnny Hobo's Fuck Cops: "I don't know where home is, but I know that I'm not there now." and once when I was I was 18 and all wrapped up way too tight and deep in these sort of Off With Their Heads topics, those particular Freight Trains songs, my mum earnestly asked me if I was doing okay and all I could really hear was that line so I mentioned it and she kinda cried and I felt weird and ashamed and I needed to listen to punk rock because that's how I dealt. How I deal, when shit gets a bit too sharply human. With punk rock like this. As a companion for the journey, a whisper on the way.

“No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.” - David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster.

RVIVR - The Beauty Between

Sometimes the things a band do outside of just making music don't matter too much, like the lead singer of Who Killed Spiky Jacket? is a UFO investigator who contributes to Ancient Aliens and that, while totally damn great, didn't really impact on the way I thought about that album, but it seems that more people have an opinion on the way RVIVR conduct themselves at shows and the shit they say than their music. Me, I probably agree with them on like 97% of the shit they believe, and while they may seem to be abrasive arseholes a bunch of the time, if I didn't listen to music made by abrasive arseholes I wouldn't listen to anything really. Most of the time too, those abrasive arseholes are nihilistic squealheads just obliterating pain and sense in a fuck-you-kill-me cacophony and a whole host of people find themselves able to get down with that or just cleanly cleaving art and artist in the way they see and discuss these acts. It's fucking sad and shitty that people have no problem listening to bands that say and do horrible stupid shit in the name of being childish pricks, but draw the line at people who might occasionally say some stupid shit in the name of trying to make things better. Too many people so pumped on a band being confrontational until a band actually confronts them about some real shit, but the relevancy and problem of RVIVR is clear from the fact that Matt Canino is one of the most prominent feminist voices in punk rock and while he should be given a prop or two for taking a stand, it's fucked up that a dude is that, even if he's obviously part of a band that's built on a level creative partnership between him and Erica Freas and admirably continually attempts to highlight non-straight non-male voices within the scene. That's the sort of conflict that they can't resolve in any interview I've read by them and maybe it's impossible to resolve.

But the joy of RVIVR is that their art has always had a nuance and subtlety that their public statements do not, which is interesting as a bunch of punk bands don't do that. For every band like Iskra whose songs talk about Ted Kaczynski like he's a freedom fighter and advocate the overthrow of the government, and then in interviews talk about Ted Kaczynski like he's a freedom fighter and advocate the overthrow of the government (constistency is the key for blackened crust anarcho-primitivists, it seems) but a lot of bands make obliterating didactic records and then seem quieter and more contemplative outside of that. You find bands like Leftover Crack write songs about killing cops and sainting the Columbine murderers but then Stza in person seems kinda bemused by his crustscum fanbase and capable of way more wit and slyness than a man who's frequently allied himself with teenage murderers just on the basis that they hated themselves too, justifying his lyrics in the grey space of poetics and capable of offering a much tighter critique of society than a song called One Dead Cop can (or, let's be honest, really is designed to), but RVIVR write some beautiful goddamn songs capable of drawing terse vivid pictures of particular spaces in society and the struggles and troubles of them inside a two minute punk song, and then in an interview manage to come across like bores who see themselves like self-appointed spokespeople for a huge number of diverse people.

Anyway, an oppressive society does not allow, or attempts to not allow, for differentiation and breadth and depth within those who are non-normative. You are white straight and male, you are allowed to choose your definition, you are punk, you are goth, you are whatever subculture you so desire, but the allowance and prominence given to these self-determinations lessens as the oppressions gather. These oppression attempt to paint women, or LGBT people, or people of colour as monoliths, single entities, so they can dismiss them, file them away, easily assimilate them. This is the process where you get someone like Andrew Pierce making a career by being a gay dude writing for a shitty homophobic conservative newspaper with the idea that "If this one gay dude is cool with it, then obviously it's not homophobic and all gay dudes are cool with it."

Yeah this fucking shitsmeared world doesn't want the glorious rainbow of differing points of view from people who are pushed down by its rulers, but art is one of the ways we reach through that, because art allows a particular point-of-view from anyone, a description of one life that has power in its individuality, the knowledge that this is a particular life, but also as it stands there alone it draws others closer when they recognise something resonant in it. So you can create community, relatable things by creating a singular thing in the knowledge that people will catch bits of themselves in its reflections, probably nots its entire shape, but you say "I FEEL LIKE THIS!" loud enough and people we call out "YEAH! ME TOO!" so we break the distances between us in this opt-in expression of emotion and hurt and awkwardness, and music, songs, are always those opt-in places, cos no-one's forcing you to singalong, so in that place we can even throw-in some "WE FEEL LIKE THIS!" sort of shouts once you drawn enough people to you and then a bunch of people will shout back "YEAH! WE DO!" The distance and function of poetry is such that you can step on into that nice "This is us." rhetoric and you don't need to spend acres of time on qualifications and rewordings and footnotes in the way that you would if you're actually trying to explicate a real entanglement of the social fuckedupness we're all indoctrinated into and pushing against or falling prey to in different ways. You can be righteous in a song. And then step out of it and into the infinitely complex scrum of crosscutting cultural pressures.

Though still, there is a constant attempt to crush these things too into easily manageable stereotype shapes, to push all descriptivist depictions into prescriptivist ones, and that's something you gotta be wary of. Now you can't judge someone too harshly for allowing their words to be snaffled up by this trap which nips and lunges to ensnare from pre-sentience to death, but you've got to attempt to at least acknowledge it, step around it somehow, and while you might want to access the easy instant swell of support that comes from "WE FEEL LIKE THIS!" rhetoric but outside of art, outside of a song, it's just gonna kinda backfire because of the world you're throwing it out into (and the world, which if you seem so up on its particular shittiness most of the time, you should know you're throwing it out into) and people are not gonna sit by and let that one slide easily. You shout "WE FEEL LIKE THIS!" (or even trickier: "THEY FEEL LIKE THIS!") there then inevitably a bunch of people are gonna call out "YEAH! WE DO!" and a bunch more people are gonna call out "THE FUCK YOU TALKIN 'WE', DICK'EAD!?" i.e. if you say something along the lines of "NO MOSHING BECAUSE WOMEN DON'T FEEL SAFE!" whatever the intent, the impact is that you're implying that the women who were moshing aren't 'proper' women, or were just too stupid to know how they felt until you told them how to feel (which also ends up in this particular case feeding into a notion of what it means to be ladylike, and ladylikeness cannot help be a prescriptive paternalistic patriarchal concept.) When you're lacing your stuff (your public statements not your art) with those prescriptivisms it's a dangerous business if you're talking about the way being part of an oppressed group (based on race, sexuality, gender, gender identity or other things) makes you a certain way, because this isn't something like punk where all the meaning is brought from outside and it's really a meaningless thing imbued with power by choice, this is some essential human deep shit that people are getting killed and destroyed behind every day so saying, even by accident, that there is a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it is fucking troublesome.

But anyway, whatever RVIVR say around their music, whatever problems they've got there, like I said, I've got no problem listening to bands where I disagree with some dumb shit they say, and this is a great album that for the first three songs at least feels like this is an instant fucking classic. The opt-in certainties of songs are where they are often strong, sometimes amazing, where they let shit shiiine.

The opener The Seam and the way it builds reminds me of the way Bent Outta Shape's Stray Dog Town opens with it's clamorous push-pull of Disappointment Rock, and that's fucking great, because Stray Dog Town is quite possibly the best (or at least my favourite) punk album of the last ten years, spindly and beautiful and snotty and scratched Marianas-deep into my soul. It's obvious that RVIVR are fans of that band (they namecheck their song Rudes and Cheaps on the very next song) and this is a perfect opener, setting out the way things with procede, rumbling on with the bass and drums, the guitar frills stabbing and poking gently, though it's tighter, fuller, less prone to bare shining bones in its construction than Bent Outta Shape's beautifully windborn snip-and-scratch feel, laying the groundwork for the explosion of the song into a few anthemic bleak inevitabilities:

"WHEN THE PAIN BEARS DOWN RIGHT TO THE SEAM 
WHEN YOU SINK DEEP DOWN TO TRY TO BREATHE 
WHEN THE PRESSURE ON EACH OTHER PULLS MORE THAN GRAVITY 
WE DON'T NEED WORDS TO SING"

Then it knocks into this nasty weirdskronk freak out like its a goddamn Colored Rice Men song or something which it bursts out of with a triumphant shout of "WE DON'T NEED WORDS TO SING!" echoing in equal parts the nerve-gas-scrawlnoise-into-chorus-refrain of Dead Kennedys' Chemical Warfare and the huge ramshackle ecstacy of Bomb the Music Industry!'s "WHEN WE'RE NOT FEELING STRONG WE GRAB THE MIC AND SING ALONG!" on Happy Anterrabae Day! and the chaos of inane loving na-na-na's that follow it. That's where this album is at right there. It's gonna kick right into the hurt, the failure of days, it's gonna try and break into itself but fuck if it's not gonna come crashing out of the mork with a "WHOA-OH-OH!", a sung sound which derives its power from its company, its choral possibilities, its pure physical release beyond its definition. It's such a perfect little trick, this album is gonna show you its fist 'fore it hits you in the face with it. It's tell you how it's gonna stunt on you, how it's gonna save your fucking dumb punkgeek head, and then it goes right ahead and does it.

Then comes another beauty in LMD, more of that tight bass rumble under a song that spraypaints its name in water, from rain to piss to holy water (there's a bunch of rain in this album, from the start of LMD to Rainspell to end of Party Queen, which is what you probably get when you live in the Pacific Northwest.) tying them together in a complicated dance of renewal. Eschewing the simple metaphor of cleansing power, acknowledging it but tying it together with the reality of a sudden downpour on a grim October afternoon trudging home from your dead-end job when all you want to do is fucking die.

"YOU WAKE UP IN THE STORM
TIRED OF SCREAMING SINCE THE DAY YOU WERE BORN
BUT THE SKY AIN'T PISSING HOLY WATER
IT MAKES YOU WET AND IT MAKES YOU DEAD THERE'S NO ONE COMING FOR YA, NO!"

That's what a lot of the best lyrics of this album often do, slice past a cliche while dragging it along with it, revivifying it by twisting it, breaking it, mocking it, then flipping it right back at just fucking bellowing it, biting comic book lines, sillily dancing up on simple pop/pulp-culture frivolities (LMD = Life Model Decoy, Marvel androids) and the way those four-colour hero-and-villain/robot-and-alien stories can hit you deeper than you'd maybe like to admit in the way that dumb little punk bands have done from The Traits' Nobody Loves the Hulk to  Screeching Weasel's 99 to Rancid's Sidekick to The Boonaraaas I'm In Love With Hulk the Monster (FUCK YOU THE TRAITS!) to Rev Norb's entire career.

That cut-cliche glass sharpness is present again on the following number, Spider Song, with its tales of social networks exploded and friends slipping away which thrown out through Freas' voice which, throughout this album, is a fucking screaming wonder. This is he first song they previewed off this album, which I listened to probably 30 times on Youtube before I'd heard the album, all run-up drums, tickles of guitar and simple truths like "THEY JUST NEVER CALL ME IT'S NOT LIKE THEY'RE DEAD / YOU CAN LOVE SOMEONE AND JUST NOT STAY FRIENDS" that push past the punxunityfriendsforever platitudes that a lot of singalong music deals in.

It's after that the album takes what might be it's first bum note, or at least it is for me, on Old Dogs. I'm probably something of a cliche with regards to my punk tastes a lot of the time (FAST AND LOUD! LOUD AND FAST!) and while I'm sure some people would find a 100% pop-punk album without any breaks to be something of a chore I just can't get with the way this album keeps dropping its momentum for these down-tempo onea. It's why I couldn't really dig a vast majority of that Apologies, I Have None album last year that so many seemed into (despite some really interestingly put together lyrics) as it felt like an album full of slow enders which, without the counterpoint just sort of wobbled around in a torpid untethered denouement and I just ain't about that.

For instance, Spider Song, the praises of which I will sing to anyone listening, is apparently adapted from Erica Freas' solo album and while she is obviously a fucking fantastic songwriter I haven't heard that album and I don't want to. Well, I heard one song and couldn’t be bothered to listen to anymore I generally find chilled-out coffee-shop acoustic stuff boring as hell. It’s only really interesting to me when it’s weird and creepy like the Vindictives acoustic album or Doc Corbin Dart’s Patricia. Liking a punk song does not mean you’re gonna like the same song when it’s acoustic, The Measure (SA)’s version of The Moment That You Said Yes is one of my favourite songs, I couldn’t make it through more than a minute of the Soltero original after I discovered it was a cover. I find ONSIND pretty damn boring but Calvinball’s cover of Heterosexuality is a Construct is fucking great. Shit, even when I love an acoustic song like Dylan’s Desolation Row I’m just as likely to jam Rev Norb’s Desolation Twist rock and roll cover. I’m a pretty fucking simple person and I’m generally in this for the speed and noise and shouting. Quietude is for people who aren’t in the mood to kick their thoughts to pieces with feedback and Gauze songs, I don’t find myself feeling like that too often, (though I did really like a bunch of that first Waxahatchee album.) Liking a punk song doesn't mean you're gonna like the same band playing half-speed, in fact that's the chief way I fall out of bands. I don't need a breather, I don't need to breathe, spent too long in quiet places listening to my own exhalations, contemplating all that turnaround mucky shit that eats at me, that RVIVR know of and sing about, and I want that slime scumblasted out of my brainstem by a song like the Big Lie and its squeaking horns and quickshuffle dances, I don't want to fucking wallow here.

So yeah, Old Dogs, not into it. While gets bigger and louder as it trudges along, it never really speeds up and the solo it goes with at about 2:20 isn't the kind of breathless little spurt of guitar squeak that the real punk songs on this album are stuck full of like firecrackers in burnt-out car shells, but more kind of a hard rock snorer where the guitarist leans back and gurns like they're taking a big dump. Not down with that. That's kinda how I feel about most of the slower songs on this album, Old Dogs, Paper Thin, Ocean Song, Hunger Suite Pt I: Go Away, Hunger Suite Pt III: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. They've got some nice moments here and there (love the split-second about 70 seconds into Ocean Song where it makes like it's gonna drench itself in noiseguitar but sadly it's a fake-out) but they just kinda plod plod plod and too often bring to mind things I do not often wish to have brought to mind by the music I love: the aforementioned hard rock, the occasional heartland lick, the odd grungey bits, all different little parts of things that either leave me cold or I've brickheadedly set myself against with barbs and poses just cos you gotta.

But but but, there's a skip button for a reason and then we go right into another goddamn great one, Wrong Way/One Way with its guitar lick that brings to mind The Tattle Tales' So Wanna Kiss You and its great goofy Rancid pisstake video, Freas and Canino's voices bouncing off each other and coming together in another big cliche-spat-so-it-matters chorus ("WRONG WAY ON A ONE WAY STREET!") and then exactly the sort of guitar that works with this band, that carries the song up to a sharp peak and then bringing it slowly down into one of those refrains and a quieter moment (which, built into a punk song and not asked to sustain themselves actually really work) before it screams back upwards again into such a beautifully that's so built for those cathartic basementpunk moments of screamed transcendence that the drop-out for the inevitable audience-participation throat-devastation holler is just a place for you to shout your own name (seriously, the record holds an unintelligible clash of shouts from the band and the lyrics on their website just read <YOUR NAME HERE> at that point, so cool), reaffirm your own fucking existence and identity in those shitty places that made you get a hold on it in the first place, which continues on the rise-and-fall of Rainspell which has some quieter cool fucking lines, pain-as-armour smirks like "LET OUR HEARTS HOLD TO THE GOOD PARTS / AND OUR WOUNDS SCAR IN GOOD LOOKING WAY" and then just an incredible moment, a shiver-everytime perfect second when the echo of a singalong rises up as Freas sings, getting that specific(place)/general(punxfeel) gap perfectly down.

BUT WE ALL KNOW 
HOW A SOUL GETS ENTANGLED
LIKE IN THE BONES AND IN THE BODIES OF ALL THE PUNX AT VVK

I don't where or what VVK is. But I know exactly what VVK is.

Yeah, so those slower bastards really aren't my deal, and they're thrown into starker relief by how bloody incredible each fast one is. The three part Hunger Suite (though it is pretty cool to see them trying something bigger like that) has a couple of slow half-numb beasts enveloping the searing second part Bleed Out which rips with an almost hardcore, almost Katie Katty fury on lines "SO NAIL YOURSELF TO YOUR OWN SINS / AND STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM MINE / WE'VE ALL GOT SOME BLOOD ON OUR HANDS AND AN ANGER INSIDE"

They really are prone too much to the plodders though, that RVIVR relentlessness that works so well with their breakneck punk smashers just works against them when they bring it down a notch and get mellower, moodier, because it sounds not like an engine pushing these songs out into the black shooting past limits and dangers, but an uncomfortable around-town rut. Their sound just doesn't work slow most of the time. They're not Flipper. Yeah, I get the idea of dynamics, of intercutting fast and slow, or maybe offering some respite from these rapid cascades of crust-pop joy, but the album just has too many of them, and all they really do is drag and tire.

Then you've got Elephant Song which is just a rattling bit of ambient oddness in the vein of the last half of Andrew Jackson Jihad's We Didn't Come Here to Rock or the opening uneasy windscrape of Unclarified by No Statik on Everywhere You Aren't Looking, actually the sort of respite and lull I might be able to get behind. The beauteous threat and swell of amplified warehouse echoes, the field recording feel like a microphone dragged behind you in one of the dirty places this album kicks with. Then goes into Party Queen which is kind of a ending 1-2 that reminds me of The Hold Steady's Crucifixion Cruise/How a Resurrection Really Feels. The slowest spaciest number of the album, before a bigger builder that seems like something of a perfect summation of what has come before. In contrast to the other slower songs (maybe just because the final song is a fitting place for it), Party Queen fucking nails it in the way it climbs up, fills out, drags everything of the album, the chugging bass, the tight militaristic drums, the blunt yelps of Canino's voice, the soar of Freas's, the unheard millions that seem to sit just outside the line ready to blast in on each chorus, those spiky-sweet guitar fills, the Marvel comic catchphrases, echoes from The Seam and Big Lie and sticks them all together before successfully collapsing in on itself with the shoutalong of the album's title. The Beauty Between. The Beauty Between the lies, as Big Lie has it; the beauty between the cracking seams; the beauty between the tired cliche and the physicality of its truth; the beauty in between the hopes and dreams of a scene and the shittiness of its problems; the beauty in between restrictive binary notions of gender; the beauty in between the moments we live for and the moments the moments we live for live to erase and fight with; the beauty in between a punk song and its antecedents; to cop a comic book line, the beauty in The Bleed; the beauty in between a specific basement and every basement show; between comic books black-and-white morality and life's aching complexities; between saying some fucking dumbass shit and singing some beautiful true shit, between two, ten, twenty, three hundred people screaming punk songs and their own fucking name all tied together by a split-second of punk rock ascension.

It's not a perfect album, but it's got enough perfect songs that I'll come back to it again and again. It's not a perfect album, but it's one which makes you believe for a while that such an album can exist. That reminds you, even if it's a scene that deserves and needs to be critiqued frequently and deeply, that the art and noise at the heart of punk rock is worth something, that a punk song played at the right time, for the right wrong kid, can hold a life from falling apart.