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
Tuesday, 24 January 2012
A non-comprehensive guide to the best music of 2011 according to me
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. 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.
1. Night Birds - Fresh Kills Vol. 1 - The best modern day punk rock money or sexual favours can buy
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!!!!!!
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. 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.
1. Night Birds - Fresh Kills Vol. 1 - The best modern day punk rock money or sexual favours can buy
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!!!!!!
Wednesday, 16 November 2011
So Scratched Into Our Souls #10: New Bomb Turks - Born Toulouse Lautrec
"...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 snotpunk 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..."
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 snotpunk 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 I
was about eleven years old. I'd be interested to hear from him. There are so
many pseudos around taking his name in vain." - The Hipcrime Vocab, Chad Mulligan (from John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar)
Thursday, 27 October 2011
So Scratched into Our Souls #9: Discount - Portrait of a Cigarette
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.
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.
Sunday, 23 October 2011
A Weaselmania Of My Own: Part One
"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-
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 an asteroid, because they were fantastic. Stay tuned for exactly why.
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-
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 an asteroid, because they were fantastic. Stay tuned for exactly why.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)