Arms Aloft - Sawdust City

BEGINNING A RUNDOWN OF MY FAVOURITE MUSIC OF 2012. IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER.

Sawdust City, industry and bloody floors. Orgcore! Beardpunk! Gruffpunk! Midwestern pop-punk! Bannerpilotblues! Whatever the fuck you wanna call it, you know how it works. Up-tempo anthemic pop-punk with the whine of spindly-pop-punk replaced by despairing bellows. Really though, this sort of thing is the Charles Bukowski to Oi!’s Richard Allen. Fight music for college dropouts conflicted about their middle-class roots and working-class existences so they beat themselves up rather than someone wearing the colours of a sports team their sports team doesn’t like. Oi! is just simple melodic singalong punk songs about working a shit job and then going out and getting drunk with your friends, orgcore (beardpunk/gruffpunk/whatever) is simple melodic singalong punk songs about working a shit job then going home and getting drunk by yourself listening to Jawbreaker, and that's the space that Arms Aloft sit in, and do it as well as anyone else ever really has.

It's stuff that's super-situated in its artistic context, working the geography of Broadways songs, listening to Ben Nichols records, throwing a nod at the sort of punk films that we spent teenage afternoons lazily watching in The Decline of Midwestern Civilization, tossing off a goofy Misfits joke on Where Seagulls Dare, it's drawing on a whole lot and it knows it, but, unlike the  thumbsucker inanity of Gaslight Anthem's rock-and-roll mythos, it cuts sharper than that, interested less in the mellifluous balm of rock-and-roll redemption, but in the moment after that, ruminating on the true malaise of poverty, the histories and sciences of being fucking skint, the day-to-day trap and we know who's to blame but we're too tired and beaten-down to raise that black flag, and fuck that black flag anyway, its got nothing on a Black Label. In its huge fucking choruses Sawdust City recalls the basement euphoria of D4's Doublewhiskeycokenoice, but its more concerned with the cold that bites the next morning when you wake up and realise it's 10 days til pay day and the heats off and you blew way too much cash on shitty beer and t-shirts last night so it twists that beautiful dancing D4 moment into the dry bleakness of DOUBLEDRANOPERCOCETNOICE. Music for the long walk home where we can touch and recall those moments of rapture that took us in the chorus but they fade away like winter breath and fuck...

Masked Intruder - s/t

Masked Intruder are four dudes in masks who sing pop-punk songs about doing crimes wearing masks. They go right for the super-poppy end of that style of punk too, that same infectious doo-wop energy that The Unlovables trade (traded? are they still together) in, tracking the genre back past the Ramones to 50s boy bands and 60s girl-group pop that the Ramones loved so much that they unwisely employed noted Pacino-in-a-Robert-Smith-biopic-lookin' crackpot Phil fucking Spector to produce End of the Century.

 I love gimmick bands done well, and punk rock lends itself incredibly well to them, given how easy it is to master the basics of the genre and then plaster on a silly constructed image and latch onto a dumb fun thing to sing about, but Masked Intruder aren't just like any gimmick band sticking religiously to an apparently arbitrary topic. Yeah, they just sing songs about crimes, sometimes about robbery and B&E but the dominant felony these rainbow balaclava boys sing about is stalking women, which means that at their best Masked Intruder are basically doing exactly the same thing with pop-punk/ramonescore that Hard Skin are doing with Oi! They're exaggerating the implied values of the genre in order to satirise the genre and doing it with great verve and making a terrific example of that genre stylistically.

There are gonna be people who do not get the joke or the point either way, be it to get offended by what they perceive as a defence of stalking or to believe that the song is serious and try and genuinely defend it. That's what happens with satire. Poe's Law applies to everything, especially everything online. That line about exaggerating implied values I cribbed from a Stewart Lee routine about Top Gear where he constantly repeats the tired old "It's just a joke" line that Top Gear presenters use to excuse all their blokish racism, sexism and homophobia while wishing death on all the presenters of Top Gear. The reason he has to make what he's doing explicit at the end of the bit is that when he first did it someone from a newspaper ran a headline like FOUL COMIC MAKES DEATH THREATS TO NATIONAL TREASURES or some stupid bullshit.

I am definitely not saying that it's unacceptable to write songs about getting dumped or unrequited love, because if I said that then that would destroy like 75% of all pop music ever and often when you start to unpick it it's bitter and hateful and shitty because emotions are, they're angry and uncertain and don't make a whole lot of sense so you can often relate (or just fucking dance) to some raw shit when it's packed into a couple minutes of perfectly put together pop, but if the only thing you know how to write songs about is how some girl broke your heart or how you just wish this girl would notice without a hint of self-deprecation, never ever moving past or just simply acknowledging the folly of the crappy recriminatory hate-spiral that people sometimes get trapped in in these moments then obviously it's gonna read at least a little damn creepy and sometimes it does seem that some pop-punk bands get like that.

Obviously heartbreak is a fantastic eternal thing to write a song about, to make fucking any art about. It's such a great everlasting topic because what the fuck else is there really? It's something that everyone can relate to because everyone's had their fair share of knocks regarding it, everyone done their own silly self-defeating unrequited dance at some point and it fucking huuurts, yeah, and when shit stings like that you wanna make art about it and feel a little less alone in it, but if you're so obsessively single-minded in your topic it starts to get just a little pathetic and a little shitty, especially in the context of a world where the sovereignty of women's bodies is still ridiculously a fucking object of discussion to way way way too many stupid fucking dickheads, and especially if all the songs are about the object of your affections and her actions rather than you and your feelings.* It can exist on an emotional plateau which you can wise-up to, get a little context and back away from, and that's cool, in the mess of yearning and desire that is a failed connection with another human being you're probably gonna be pissed off with someone else at some point, but if you persevere with the broken logic beneath those feelings, if you stay on that path a little further of then it's really just a hop, skip and a jump to outright misogyny that a shit-ton of easycore bands seem to have gleefully made.** That is the point Masked Intruder are making by pushing that sort of "Hey I love this girl she don't love me back" narrative to the conclusion it all too often reaches in real life, with a supremely fucked-up creepy dude stalking someone who just had the misfortune to have an inkling that he was the sort of supremely fucked-up creepy dude who would stalk someone and shut him the fuck down. That's the main point here, if you're the sort of person who writes endless uncontemplative songs about a girl who told you to get gone then she was almost certainly in the right telling you to get gone.

So there's a bunch of songs on this album which start as seemingly innocent paeans to a beautiful girl and then ramp up the weirdness and intensity of the affection until people who would start off by proclaiming the depiction of unanswered love (which often isn't love but just lust in a thin jacket of neutering shit poetry) to be a most fine GPOY have to start going "Hey, dude that's kinda fucked-up." when the lyrics turn to the subject of brandishing a knife in the girl's bedroom and peeling away in the manner of the Mountie choir abandoning Michael Palin's lumberjack as his penchant for cross-dressing begins to first peep-through and then overwhelm the macho façade that they were invested in. Songs where lines like "I'm crazy for you" are dragged out of the swirling void of empty cliché that is the notion of love-as-insanity and imbued with new starker meaning in a place where the lead singer's character is a genuine danger to the one who justifiably jilted him.

(There's also a bunch of songs which just play the hoods-in-hoods gimmick line straight chronicling a power-pop crime-spree in the manner of the Hanson Brothers' hockey songs and they're just as catchy and well-constructed in their sweet-voiced hooky ramonomaniacal Shonen Knife/Manges/whoever spirit as the rest of the album but less interesting in the way their jokes and knives are aimed.)

Nowhere on the record is the pop-punk creep-factor put more firmly or clearly on blast than in the terrific Heart-Shaped Guitar, a duet with Maura Weaver from Mixtapes, which stands as the key song here in regards to Masked Intruder's satirical intentions, ripping that pathetic unselfaware romantic bullshit to shreds by counterpointing the desperate lovelorn poetry of a guy standing outside a girl's house at 3am and his total conviction in his prick-poet starry-eyed righteousness with the utterly fucking freaked-out weirded-out creeped-out and probably many other sorts of outs feeling of the girl standing inside the house looking at this potential psychopath strumming songs on her lawn. It gives agency to the usually anonymously perfect blank objects-of-affection in these sorts of odes and she is not fucking impressed. The call-and-response takedown/reversal of a song of matters-of-the-heart has been done a lot over the years and been packed with a lot of human fire from June and John's braggadocio and scoffing on Jackson to Margie Hendricks playing automatic rejector to Ray Charles on Hit the Road, Jack and here it sometimes reminds me of those Frankee/Eamon back-and-forth response songs from a few years back trapped into one fucking fantastic sharp-as-shit buzz-pop jam in how it sets up the standard perspective of the tragic melancholy male whine and then comes at it biting from the other side. So in addition to being a great bubblegum punk song it might work as a kick up the arse to people who don't get that yet they're not the shining romeo of the world's greatest love story, of course I'm sure some people will not get it at all and just be like "OH MY GOD THIS SONG IS TOTALLY ABOUT ME I TOTALLY RELATE TO THAT GUY!" without realising it's a bad thing and those people are probably like 2 years tops from posting on Reddit about 'friendzones' like they're some serious social phenomenon not the feverish invention of sad hack comedians and calling themselves a Men's Rights Activist. Cunts.

In the meantime, the rest of us can dance along to some of the most irresistible sweet-sounding goofy pop-punk. Damn those melodies get right down in your criminal bones.

*my favourite break-up songs are ones that are more conflicted deal more ambiguously with the fucked-up emotional tangle of a parting, like Oblivians' Bad Man, AM!'s Cavalier Eternal (which I've written about on this blog before) or any number of supremely witty self-deprecating MTX songs (which I was gonna write about but then I followed Dr Frank on Twitter which ended with him complimenting me on my blog and I got weirded-out freaked-out and all sorts of other outs and didn't do it)

**I seriously heard a terrible easycore song the other day which included the line SO WHEN YOU'RE BLOWING ALL TIME LOW I HOPE YOU THINK OF ME! and there is at least one totally vile A Story So Far song like this as well. Something about the genre just melds the worst tendencies of pop-punk with the worst tendencies of hardcore too. Those people need this record though I'm sure it'll go way over their head because it sounds more like Dion and the Belmonts*** than Title Fight

***Runaround Sue is a tremendous pop-song and has some really fucked-up sexual politics, which kinda goes back to what I was saying about pop-music always being knee-deep in this heartbreak miasma and how not everyone can unpick the catchiness of the melodies from the twattishness of the feelings.

The Gaslight Anthem - Handwritten

“[Nostalgia] can be generally defined as a state of inarticulate contempt for the present and fear of the future, in concert with a yearning for order, constancy, safety, and community—qualities that were last enjoyed in childhood and are retroactively imagined as gracing the whole of the time before one's birth.” - Luc Sante, Low Life

That quote probably tells you what this review is gonna be about and usually I don't bother writing too much about stuff I'm not into and I know the shit that you hate don't make you special, but really the shit that you love don't make you special either, and that applies doubly so if you love the Gaslight Anthem.

Their popularity in the punk scene might be an anathema to some, considering they play some of the most watered down safe softer-than-softer-rock and cite Dire Straits, the most terrible asinine bullshit middle-aged sanitised band ever, as a direct influence, but that's only if you forget that large parts of the punk scene are insecure people in their 20s trying to escape from the fact that they were insecure people in their teens by clinging on to some maturity liferaft that will give them an excuse to smoothly slide out of liking (or at least exclusively liking) music that sounds like a pneumatic drill into liking music that sounds like a marshmallow mortgage and then make fun of people who dare to continue to find interest in the clang and harshness of bands working a noise vein from a position that they believe to be morally right, but in fact is just the pisswarm warmspot of small-c conservatism. These bands have always existed and always will. As Steve Albini said about The Replacements: “The Replacements Stink is a great record and their first couple of years they were an energetic and exciting band. Once they started getting serious about it it turned to cute lovey-dovey shit for sorority girls and Tom Petty fans and I stopped paying attention.“

Not everyone has the energy to keep listening to bands that sound like the Dead Kennedys or Crazy Spirit, but not everyone has the gumption to just quit the music that meant so much to them for their formative period, (or if not quit then just simultaneously openly embrace something that the music they loved is explicitly set-up in counter to) so they find a way out through a band that might've started off in the punk scene but moved outside of it. Usually there's still pushback against these bands for 'selling out' from people who don't want to move on which I know is a pretty dumb concept and you can make the art you want to make, in the context you feel comfortable with and if you feel comfortable making pop-rock or college-rock or whatever they're calling middle-of-the-road music with guitars these days, like The Replacements, the Lemonheads and Against Me all found themselves doing, then go for it, but it's equally shitty to claim that the people who liked the art you made before are idiots for not following exactly the same personal arc as you did away from it. Also, there has been little such backlash against Gaslight from this probably because they played extremely radio-friendly punk rock in the first place. I don't expect the backlash to start here, but unlike The Replacements who still managed to imbue their MTV hits with a certain fuck-you attitude and the powerful desires and conflicts of youth, Gaslight Anthem and Handwritten is just a turgid sadwank over a time when you didn't have to deal with bands that actually tore at the world. You can make the art you want to make, like I said, and Gaslight have always done that, however, if you make shit art, especially that which taps cynically into a horrible appropriative myth of conformity and have ever in any small way been associated with a scene that explicitly rejects such antiseptic blandishments, someone's gonna eventually call you on making a regurgitative turgid sadwank of an artistic statement. That said, let's look at the songs!

Starting off with 45, the song they released earlier to trick people into thinking that they were gonna make something else that sounded like Sink or Swim or Senor and the Queen. It's a pretty catchy song to get things started with. It’s got a fun surfy solo around two-minutes in. That’s one more facet of decades old irrelevant Americana checked off the list, I guess. It’s a wistful song about listening to records. Basically American Steel’s Old Croy Road if that song had it’s screaming heart ripped out and replaced with a undercooked po-faced gurn.

Then we move on to the title track. Which is a a wistful song about listening to records that romanticises another analogue communication form because goodness knows things were better in the past when everything was all sepia-toned and whatever. It’s got a gospelly hum in the background around three-minutes in. That’s one more facet of decades old irrelevant Americana checked off the list, I guess.

Next up is Here Comes My Man. Seger? I barely know ‘er! Oh wait, BOB Seger? Yes, I am intimately familiar with his life’s work. Just listen to this record if you don’t believe me! As for the title, yeah, we all know who Lou Reed is, Brian.

Moving on to Mulholland Drive. and, yeah, we all know who David Lynch is, Brian. I’m really really not opposed to reference as a technique in art and I and every writer I know uses it pretty much all the fucking time but Brian Fallon seems to deal solely in the most obvious things that anyone who thinks they’re plugged in to some mainstream oh-we’re-not-mainstream-we’re-rock-and-roll-rebels view of an American artistic narrative will pick-up on. You can be into that if you want but I find it unbearably boring and it’s always accompanied by the mephitic air of rockist self-regard as the anointed defenders of TRUE MUSIC and TRUE CULTURE, and fuck that. They may have called their last album American Slang, but they wouldn't be caught dead using any contemporary slang, preferring the static categorised vocabulary of the quickly-retreating past rather than the livewire mutability of fresh language.

He’s almost entirely unstransformative in his reference too, it’s just the warmth of recognising something familiar, which is the sort of thing people wrongly accuse stuff like Community of where that builds in meta-reference into character moments and twists the structures of these things we know into fresh excitement. This is just HEY AREN’T ALL THE THINGS EVERYONE SAYS ARE GREAT GREAT! It’s like a hip-hop song giving a shout out to 2pac or Biggie, or that terrible Glasvegas song where it bites the piano from Moonlight Sonata in lieu of attempting to construct something genuinely moving by itself. The Hold Steady is Community. Brian Fallon is like the Big Bang Theory for people who subscribe to Rolling Stone.

Also, in this track, the lyrics tell us that THE RADIO IS ON which is Brian Fallon’s shortcut to telling you we’re in that ineffable American never-was where everyone feels safe in the grasp of the tedious whiteboy monoculture and everything makes sense and the airwaves chug along to PROPER music not all that nasty hippity-hop and pop music or talk radio or any of the things that actually are on the radio a lot of the time. The Gaslight Anthem is the Newsroom for people who subscribe to Q Magazine.

Then we have Keepsake, which might be about murdering a woman and dumping her body in the river, but it’s like he wrote that song then fudged it because he wanted to be all nasty and honest like Johnny Cash or Nick Cave but didn’t want his mummy to think he’s not a nice boy. It’s like Nick Cave if you took away all the gothic menace and minatory artistry. Did they have harmonica on any of their older songs? If not that’s another PROPER HEARTLAND ROCK BAND checklist tick.

Too Much Blood opens with the line: “Are you scared this sounds familiar?” More like sadly resigned, Brian. This is a real plodder. He worries about putting too much blood on the page. He put too much shit in my ears. He also talks about bleeding a lot on this record, which is fine I guess, if you like trite metaphors that have been worn into the ground by around 8 trillion other people all convinced of THEIR ULTIMATE PAIN. I guess maybe the most interesting thing about the Gaslight Anthem is that there's the real authenticity/inauthenticity tension going on. He constantly talks about how much he's opening himself up, but then a shitload of the songs seem to be character songs, and the band itself is so blatant a shot at saying "WE ARE SERIOUS ROCK AND ROLL PEOPLE!" that it seems kinda goofy and adorable at times, like a five year old wearing their parents clothes. Sometimes you think they're deliberately aware of this and then you realise that it's not cynical, it's just Brian Fallon really is too bad of a lyricist to think of a line that isn't an obvious bleeding metaphor followed by a hey-look-at-this shout-out to a far superior writer. Which is almost sweet, in its own “Oh what an adorable guileless idiot” kind of way, or it would be if he wasn't a successful musician and like 32 or something.

Then comes Howl, and yeah, we all know who Allen Ginsberg is, Brian. “Radio, oh radio, do you believe there’s still some magic left” No, fuck off. We’ve been over this. That's even more pathetic though. There's no longer the implicit placing of the song in this past which obviously NEVER FUCKING EXISTED, but a pathetic pleading for a time when all your taste got dictated to you by people wiser and smarter than you, but still apparently listening to this music made you badass and original. This isn't the threat of coup d'etat in The Ramones' We Want the Airwaves, the frustration of Alkaline Trio's We've Had Enough, it's a craven cry for the abdication of choice and thought when it comes to taste. and, to paraphrase Drew Magary writing about that other indelible backwards looking romanticiser of dead and dying media, Aaron Sorkin: this is trite, messagey bullshit, and he's not even making a good point. No one in their right mind wants to go back to a world where you had to listen to a fucking commercially dictated music box to get all your culture in the world. I know olds gonna old, but do youngs gotta old too? Their staggering popularity reminds me of that South Park episode where all the kids get doped up and start listening to Phil Collins.

Biloxi Parish is more Seger, more plodding. Good job on at least picking an original location for this song. Oh wait, he just namechecked Asbury Park. That's another thing, I like a bunch of the touchstones that Gaslight touch. I love Springsteen and Waits and Dylan, because they all crafted themselves great fucking works that were obviously built with a fairly substantial amount of self-conscious nostalgic mythmaking, but they let their influences coalesce into a new fresh whole that was indelibly them. The Gaslight Anthem are second-artist syndrome, just painting the painting, aware only of the brushstrokes not the motivation behind them, seeing only the top of the iceberg (which I'll admit is a cliche enough sentence that it could be a Brian Fallon lyric "OH BABY I COULD SEE YOU WERE AN ICEBERG HONEY BABY! HIDDEN IN YOUR DEPTHS WAS A BLEEDING THUNDER ROAD MAYBE!"). There is no depth of inventiveness, there's no sharpness or freshness, just cliches and I guess if you relate to the world through the power of cliches then good for you, they do tend to have a certain truth to them. I'm sure David Foster Wallace would approve.

Desire is finally another fucking up-tempo one. I’m almost tempted to love this just for the relief it provides. Sadly the lyrics are basically some nice-guy-syndrome easycore bullshit. I probably would've let this one slide had it come near the top of the album though. As it is I was just like "Who cares?" All momentum has been abandoned in favour of this meek smooshy niceness. This one song won't bring it back. A.O.arse.

Not sure which Mae the song Mae is about but it's probably West, given the way this record goes. This song seriously uses the line ‘Bette Davis Eyes’. See what I mean about the most fucking obvious glib no-work shortcut artistically-bankrupt references ever? AND THE RADIO IS ON AGAIN! Incidentally, listening to Bette Davis Eyes 12 times in a row is a much more effective way of capturing that breathy wistful lost-Americana feeling that Bri-Bri and the boys are tilting at because Kim Carnes took an American icon and bent her myth into a whole new thing, drawing from it, adding to it, pulling bits of herself into it, not just being an empty cipher for whatever wikipedia page she clicked on after starting with "HOLLYWOOD". She didn't just go "This girl's really cool. LIKE BETTE DAVIS LOL YEAH!?".

It ends with a song quite fittingly entitled National Anthem, because that's what this record is. It's an attempt to construct something uncontroversial and unifying that instead just highlights the divisions of the past and present, divisions which were swept under the rug far more in the past and we, struggingly but happily, have to live with in the noisy present, unless of course you want to retreat to a safe past that never fucking existed. This one's got a Bob Dylan (or possibly Elvis, who, if you would like to have this review quickly and cleanly cite a far greater writer in order to attempt to cling Fallonesque and desperate onto the coat-tails of their power, skill and insight, was a hero to most but he never meant... oh you know the rest. Motherfuck him and John Wayne.) reference, and one he’s actually used before, on Sink Or Swim, from It's Alright, Ma, I'm Only Bleeding (a fantastic fucking song with more ideas in one verse than Gaslight have probably exhibited their entire career). Does Brian 'No Laff' Fallon own like 4 CDs that he got free with some glossy dad-mag like Uncut all entitled THE ONLY ROCK AND ROLL SONGS YOU'LL EVER NEED (which he took sadly literally) and sells everyone on the idea that he’s got a deep meaningful relationship with the entire fossil-rock canon by the fact that he’s pretty and does that soulful constipated thing with his voice every now and then? Again, you can position yourself in whatever socio-mythological artistic tradition you want (and a lot of the bands I love like Night Birds or The Wankys or Mean Jeans are clearly aiming to replicate fairly closely a particular musical style that someone invented in the past and sticking with it because they love it, progress be damned) if people are gonna shamelessly rip-off, imitate and also DUMB DOWN the achievements of the past, does it have to be these achievements with their vile cultural narrative of sad bastard radio-rock entitlement? If so, why? Answers in a handwritten letter on paper made of AMERICAN REDWOOD TREES AND SEALED WITH WAX IN AN ENVELOPE MADE OF BURLAP OR SOME SHIT. WHAT EVEN IS BURLAP!?

In conclusion: It was just so boring. You can be into inoffensive soft-rock if you want but I fucking resent the way this is constantly sold as REAL MUSIC and also as MATURE MUSIC that you should like more than silly punk rock if you’re smart and good or grown up or whatever bullshit ego trip they’re selling to you this week when this is just the snoozing arrested development of someone bummed out they never got to live in a time where all their cultural choices were made for them expressing that wetfart nostalgia through the medium of songs that sound like Bob Seger and lines ripped without context or thought from a New York Times special supplement list of THE 100 GREATEST THINGS SERIOUSLY TOTALLY REVOLUTIONARY THINGS WHITE PEOPLE DID EVER. The past fucking sucked. Gimme some noise. Burn this shit to the fucking ground.

That was fun.

The Fullthrottlelazy Podcast Episode #3

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

DOWNLOAD FULLTHROTTLE LAZY EPISODE 3

Tracklisting after the break.

The Fullthrottlelazy Podcast Episode #2

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

PODCAST EPISODE TWO