The shopkeeper must have thought I was demented when I picked up this CD and stood open mouthed for a few moments. The fact was that I only had a tenner on me, this was 9 quid, and I wanted the promo copy of the Roadside Monument album for 2 quid. So I ran out of the shop, down the stairs, across the street, and then waited for ages at the cash machine queue, before running back again, and making the purchase. Mr. Shopkeeper gave me a very strange look. Fact is, stuff like this is just *doesn’t* turn up in Leicester. Yet the shop had it, and in the forthcoming weeks I am going back for the cheapo Triplefastaction and Skimmer albums he had too. So if you live in Leicester, don’t buy these please. I want them.
A few days earlier I had heard Dillinger 4’s split 7″ with the Strike, and was relatively impressed, but I had it in my head that they were supposed to be spectacular. Then I read in Fracture that the new album was. Sod it, I’d buy it anyway. I think I made the right move.
If any of you people reading are holdovers from the days when Collective used to be rather more Brit-rock oriented, then this review will make use of reference points that you will recognise. Whilst Dillinger 4 are wholeheartedly punk rock, I’d like to bring in the names: Joyrider, the Wildhearts. If you can envisage what a fuckin’ crazy Joyrider would sound like, playing punky 100% of the time, then this is it. If you mix that in with some of the punk songs the Wildhearts used to do, you know, like “Suckerpunch”, before adding a bit more punk rock, you get this album. Sound good to you? Would sound good to me if I was reading it. What is most amazing though, is that the band could be classified as pop punk, due to their addictive riffing and nose for how to make a loud noise sound catchy. Just like the Wildhearts, eh?
Non stop, fast paced, punking action start to finish. From the slightly Jawbreaker-esque “O.K. F.M. D.O.R.” (with Joyrider vocals), the breakneck punk rock of the song named for the legendary Chicago Bears linebacker “#51 Dick Butkus” and “Portrait of the Artist as a Fucking Asshole” with it’s anthemic chorus and roared verses. It’s just a catalogue of 2 minute long classics. How about the best song Joyrider never wrote? “Twenty One Said Three Times Quickly”, sure to bring a pang of recognition from anyone getting ‘old’. And I’ll bet you’ll be pumping your fist in the air and yelling a long ‘Fuck them all!’ during the chorus for “Super Powers Enable Me To Blend In With Machinery”. These guys just have the best song titles ever, check out “Mosh for Jesus” and “It’s A Fine Line Between The Monkey & The Robot”. Perhaps the best of the best is “Honey, I Shit the Hot Tub” with its chugga chugga bass guitar and uplifting Irish style chorus, but it’s unfair to pick bests. It all rules.
Whilst you probably won’t pick up many of the lyrics whilst its going on, give the lovely thick booklet some reading. I haven’t ‘dug’ words like these since Honeycrack’s ‘Prozaic’. If you ignore the lyric book here, you’re missing out on what this band has to offer. Songs that will strike a chord about being stuck in a mundane job, wanting to make something more of it, the state the world is in, the image of how we are ‘supposed’ to be. And all set to that backdrop of punk tunes to die for. You also gotta dig the samples of the angelic American school girls singing “sing, sing together, merrily, merrily sing” between track #3 and #4. They come back later for “hello! hello! hello!”.
If you can resist the lure of the air guitar on the mindblowing riffs going on here, then you hate rock music, and there is no cure. Otherwise pick this up immediately, and put it on the highest volume imaginable. I can’t wait to put this on a tape, and drive to it. Fast. Album of 1998. No question.
PS – I read they played some shows with the Promise Ring. Heh.