Stooges swagger and gut and snot, rumbling basslines and the nasal bite of the vocals while the guitars flail and thrash about them. They've got the feel of the more bluesy New Bomb Turks numbers, and more than a hint of Eric Davidson's scathing wit to them as well. Wedding Song takes apart the facade of an unhappy marriage, constructing one of those great break-up songs where it's less about some specific fault but the unsteady foundation that this was built on, sneering "Two kids playing an adult game You can't fix your identity by changing your name".
Rock Sing excoriates the tedious old punk fucks who run through the same tutting bullshit they rebel against and have totally boomer'd up in their narcissistic accidental conflation of their own narrow tepid cultural narrative with the entire span of fucking human culture, whining "Their rock’n’roll IS noise pollution" about the teenage music of today. Red Blade snarls with mid-tempo slasher menace. Patrol begins with a sort of outraged-warning call-and-response that is filtered vocally through a Joey Vindictive pastiche of a reproaching mother and goes on to construct a short war song that never really comes down one side or the other in its condemnation but, like the whole albums, is bathed in an air of baleful contempt for fucking everything. This is mean, minatory rock and roll. On Homeless Records.
This is so much fun. Brief pogo-punk ditties with screechy female vocals, like The Grumpies meet The Disclapties. 12 songs, 13 and a half minutes. I have no fucking clue what any of these songs are about, but there is a song called Violent Violence, another call Crucidix. Pure obnoxion and it's all so bouncy and fun, the pop of the drums and the clamor of noise, the goofy-sweet almost Jughead-style simple guitar lines on songs like Frolic!, songs that begin with an intense squeal of feedback and glass being smashed as if it was a fucking leitmotif, the high-pitched squawk of the vocals snapping at everything through the noise and muddle. With this, the new Vaginors 7" and the inexorable glue-addled rise of Who Killed Spikey Jacket? there seems to be a minor-resurgence in that sort of dumb-as-fuck funpunk alley-dance-party Tom and Boot Boys shit, where the babble and spit of broken twitch-close arseholes kicks over the po-faced goodperson pronouncements of stale hippie shit and run away giggling.
What would The Mummies be like if their gimmick wasn't being incompetent revenant lounge-lizards of Karloff-pulp garage-snot, but being swing-first emotionally-stunted Noo Yawk assholes. Go Home is city beasts and contempt, spiking snare hits, revelling in subway graffiti and proclaiming Ground Zero Hardcore over burning towers on the back cover. This is 96 tears drawn from leathery bullies sticking knives into mortar, chanting murder and trouble amongst simple organ lines and surf meannesses. It's Hard On The Street is a tramp home where you drag yourself back from some shitty nightjob or bad bar letting the loathing and hatred of your sad traipse roll around inside of you and sharpen your step into a don't-fuck-with-me stalk that tries to grind its way through the asphalt and tarmac with each hated step. It's also got something of that tight crew face-in-the-camera backed-up shit with its little choral echoes of "FUCK THE STREET!". Don't Walk Away From Me rides its buzzy keyboard underruns from a little lumbering bug-beat into an urgent runaway downtown ride into the dankness and blight. This album is about those wormy twin feelings of city living, where you despise the alienation and industrial numbness of these human-factory farms ("I don't belong here." broods Snide...Petty...Fools) but also revel in the badass ice-eyed streetwise motherfuck-goddamn-superstar-Luke-Cage-fearless cynosure shitcun' cunt you cut yourself into in order to survive.
Most of the tracks have simple refrains that build and twist in on themselves, growling and snapping at you, twitching inwards and out with raw raw firehose power, like the song My House which consists almost entirely of the line "HEY YOU! GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!" like that point of utter dissolution in an argument that ends a party or relationship when you just hang on to one phrase repeating it with machine-malfunction rhythm again and again and a-fucking-gain to the slippery point of semantic satiation because its that now-or-never separation you need right now, not any sort of showdown, not any sort of explication of issues and history you just need the lonesomeness and you can't see anywhere, think of anything, but that repitition and the respite it seems to shape.
This whole record, from the clanking sewer-noise of its untitled track, to the redneck rumblings at the start of Bad Things which quickly devolving into another growling stompy scratching-at-the-seams mess, is a jittery uncomfortable grumble on urban rot and the Mega-City Dredd attitude it cultivates inside us that boots up against our smarts and dreams and failing stars and tussles there til we drown it with alcohol or cyborg drugs or abandon the fight, the blame and the corruption, for the quieter apocalypses of suburban blowjobs.
This is violent, stripped-down catchy-as-fuck garage-punk, all Lee Ving pose and Travis Bickle psychosis, Dee Dee anxiety and Hubert Selby Jr depravity, itching and twirling in its own rock and roll pissstains and spraypaint-hiss, culminating in genuinely fucking painful nasty rant on I Don't See Nothin' where the shitskein unravels and the plastered-on nihilism and worldfuck demeanor turns finally in itself in an comes apart shuddering with trypophobic reaction to the neurotic holes in ourself and our lives, screaming with hate and panicattack flames that burn themselves out into dry declarations of all-encompassing negative realities, as the album stumbles to an unhappy sobbing end amongst the clatter of drums, the dimming of the city's glamour and the taut keening of suicidal ideation and guitar feedback.
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 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.
