Labels: Close to Home Records
Review by: Edward Ling
I do like a bit of vitriol. Never happier than when consuming something that rails against mundanity, the inane, the pointless and / or the stupid. Anger. Genuine anger “” at existential things, not just how your job is shit or some incoherent toddlerish reaction against the man and capitalism and all that (thanks Itch and the King Blues) – I like that too. Anger I mean, not Itch or the King Blues. They simply suck. This is an album built on that kind of self-destructive, spiteful, call it Dostoevsky-ish anger, but without feeling the need to get all shouty-screamy or otherwise doomy. So despite the fact the band has a bit of a silly name, the album title could be interpreted as puerile and this sounds more than a little lo-fi, this is garage punk music with some serious soul. There’s a four-tracky, distorted feel to the production and to the sound generally (this seems to be very now, amongst those North American kids in particular). It’s good value for money too – this is a full, 15 track album’s length of occasionally rather scuzzy punky stuff that ranges from sounding like Superchunk, through something Mark Arm might have made to other hard indie-guitar fare of the early to mid nineties that girls and the cooler kids tended to like (there are many on this site who know this end of the market far better than I, so I shall refrain from using Wikipedia to look up a suitably obscure example to sound cool myself). If you’re reading this, on this site, you’ll likely know what I mean. Anyway. Yeah, is good this.