Results tagged “So Cal punk”

Sweet Rot: Drug Fiend

By Sobriquet Magazine on December 1, 2009 4:19 PM

Sweet Rot

Drug Fiend
Square Wave, 2007

Although Sweet Rot may not bowl anyone over with their relatively generic brand of lo-fi garage punk, their Drug Fiend EP is nevertheless worth a few spins on the old turntable. Indeed, while this Orange County outfit's sound is a largely predictable admixture of raw vocals and fuzzy guitars with rockabilly and surf rock accents, the band's brilliant incorporation of well-placed, bizarrely ghoulish backing vocals (a feature especially effective on the EP's closing track) really makes this disk stand out from the rapidly-expanding pile of indistinguishable lo-fi recordings littering your neighborhood record shop.

Highlight:

Track 3. "Wouldn't You Like To Know (What I Did With Your Mom)?" This is what it would sound like if a bunch of punk kids got stoned and decided to hire a two-bit (and perhaps lobotomized) Elvis impersonator to try and imitate Lux Interior and Dave Vanian. Somehow, it works magnificently.

Sobriquet Grade: 79 (C+).

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Randoms: ABCD/Let's Get Rid of New York

By Sobriquet Magazine on November 28, 2009 4:17 PM

Randoms

ABCD/Let's Get Rid of
New York
Dangerhouse, 1977

Something of an early L.A. punk supergroup, Randoms consisted of X's John Doe on bass, the Screamers' K.K. Barret on drums, and Pat Garrett (Black Randy & the Metrosquad) on guitar and vocals. And you can tell: despite the relatively lo-fi recording, the band sounds remarkably tight. In fact, the gritty nature of the production probably enhances the disk, adding a layer of sonic filth to the decidedly New York flavor of the A-side and just enough distortion to the buzzing B-side to endow it with the sort of rough-edged sound that I associate with some of the best producers of the 1980s D.I.Y. scene.

Between the song's comparatively spare instrumentation and Garrett's slightly drawled vocals, "ABCD" certainly recalls the decadent spirit of post-New York Dolls Johnny Thunders, but the track is actually much closer to the playfully affected innocence and girl-chasing spirit of pop-punk than to the nihilistic drug-laden gloom of glamish Heartbreakers copycats. The B-side, on the other hand, is straight-up angry punk rock (the contemptuousness with which Garrett enunciates "all the money left on Wall Street" and "the whores left on 42nd Street," for instance, is pure bile) with an intense bassline, buzzsawing guitars, and crashing drums. Indeed, while Randoms do sound like a different band on each side of the disk, they sound like two really good outfits, and the record marks a solid -- if not great -- debut release for the seminal Dangerhouse label.

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LAB: Burning Leaf/Chihuahua

By Sobriquet Magazine on April 27, 2009 2:01 AM

LAB

Burning Leaf/Chihuahua
It's Alive, 1997

LAB only barely fits within the purview of Sobriquet Magazine. Thanks to the "punk-related" clause in our review policies, however, it makes the cut. You see, LAB is basically the final incarnation of the metallic hardcore punkers formerly known as Bl'ast. After Clifford Dinsmore left the band in 1989, guitarist Mike Neider took over the band's vocals and the group morphed into Blackout and, finally, LAB before petering out in the late nineties.

While "Burning Leaf" may be a bit speedier than your typical stoner sludge dirge, this disk is basically the sort stuff fans of Black Sabbath, Kyuss, and Blue Cheer would dig. I mean, the musicianship is tight and the songs are long. You know, competent hard rock. The only problem is there's not a whole lot of oomph to the record.

Sobriquet Grade: 78 (C+).

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Bad Religion: Bad Religion (EP)

By Sobriquet Magazine on January 6, 2009 2:42 PM

Bad Religion

Bad Religion
Epitaph Records, 1981

Bad Religion's self-titled debut EP is pretty much exactly what a fan of the band would expect (unlike, say, 1983's Into the Unknown): tightly-played melodic punk rock, intelligent (if, occasionally gratuitously abstruse) lyrics, and multi-vocal harmonies delivering sociopolitical critiques. Bad Religion is also exactly what you'd expect from a group of precocious fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds playing in a hardcore band in the early 1980s: a bunch of barely distinguishable tracks played at blazing speed and a lot of anger that seems just a little bit forced, as if they're trying to compete with older, cooler kids.

While certainly not as good as their later, more mature recordings, Bad Religion is considerably better than most of the hardcore records coming out of Southern California at the time. You can definitely hear intimations of the deep melodies and astoundingly thoughtful lyrical content of albums like Suffer and The Process of Belief on Bad Religion. It just sounds like we're listening outside the band's practice space as they're attempting to find their sound. Give 'em a few years and they'll be legendary...

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Drunk in Public: Tapped Out

By Sobriquet Magazine on December 31, 2008 11:33 AM

Back in the mid-nineties I hosted a radio show on my college's in-house station and, of all the record labels I contacted, Fearless Records was the most enthusiastic about sending me their releases (I also remember getting some stuff from Fat Wreck Chords and the station manager taking all the NOFX CDs for himself...). While none of the CDs I got from Fearless were mind-blowingly original, I did enjoy adding some Blount, Glue Gun, 30 Foot Fall, Grabbers, and White Caps tunes to the program. At any rate, the one record I recall playing most frequently both on- and off-air was Drunk in Public's Tapped Out! so it is with some pleasure and quite a bit of nostalgia that I return to the disk this early New Year's morning.


One of the legions of similar-sounding pop-punk bands active in the late eighties and early nineties, Drunk in Public contributed some of the catchier tracks to a few of the era's more memorable compilations, toured the States a couple of times, and released Tapped Out! which, it seems, remains the band's most well-known work.

As I've said, though, Tapped Out! does little to distinguish itself from what is, in retrospect, an unbelievably sprawling body of largely-forgotten pre-Green Day boom pop-punk. Still, while the style and sound of the music is essentially interchangeable with those of now-neglected bands, the album's quality production and the band's tight musicianship combine to make one of those disks that I will continue to dig out once in a while to add some variety to my (soon-to-be-resumed) radio show. Furthermore, the bits of funk (especially on the slap-bass happy "Don't Give Up"), hardcore, and pseudo-hair metal (take the Van Halenish opening to "Looking Back," for instance) make the record stand out from the pop-punk pack. But not by much.

Highlights:

Track 1. "The Way He Feels." This was always a popular song when I played it. The first of many songs about relationships on the album.

Track 3. "Enemies." Probably the band's most well-known track, "Enemies" appeared on at least one compilation (one of Fearless's Punk Bites disks) and is yet another breakup song.

Track 4. "Meaningless." A hardcore-tinged song about a dysfunctional relationship. Noticing a pattern yet? The whoah-oh-oooh-oooh-ohs, though, make it a keeper.

Track 5. "Everyday." Take Screeching Weasel and move them to sunny California and you've got another catchy Drunk in Public love song.

Track 14. "Shades of Gray." The best vocal performance on the disk, I reckon, "Shades of Gray" offers a lot for the punker looking for something to sing to while sitting in traffic.

Sobriquet Grade: 81 (B-).

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Flipper: Generic Flipper

By Sobriquet Magazine on December 2, 2008 1:12 AM

There's that stereotype of parents unable to appreciate the music of their children's generation. It's fairly standard sitcom fare, really. You know, the tendency TV parents have to declare some hip band's music to be "racket" while angrily demanding that the stereo volume be lowered to more reasonable decibel levels. Invariably, the tableau shifts from the thoroughly un-chic parents to the eyerolling teen, grudgingly turning the knob towards low volume while lamenting his or her tragic situation: living under the style-cramping rule of draconian and uncool parents.


Other than having overheard my father describe "today's rock music" as "a bunch of screaming and yelling" at the time Duran Duran and Tears for Fears dominated the airwaves, my parents never really complained about the music I would listen to. I distinctly remember discussing the Dead Kennedys' Frankenchrist with my mother, explaining why I thought it was a good idea for me to listen to it despite the presence of the infamous Parents Music Resource Center sticker warning us that the music had explicit lyrics and hearing my mom respond to my impassioned explanation with "Well, if that's what you get out of it, okay." So, even the PMRC's cautionary branding of explicit records did little to spark teen-parent acrimony in my house. (Of course, "explicit" doesn't actually mean "dirty" or anything . . . just that the words are clearly stated and relatively unambiguous. You know, there aren't any metaphors. The irony, of course, is that "explicit lyrics" is itself coded language, an implicit way of informing people that taboo subjects like penises, suicide, the occult, and such were on an album. Then again, Tipper Gore couldn't even utter the word "masturbation" when talking about Prince's "Darling Nikki," but I digress . . . )

Anyway.

So, back to my childhood. As I was saying, my parents were remarkably accepting of my musical tastes growing up. I mean, they actually liked the Ramones and didn't seem to mind my owning records by bands with names like Dead Kennedys, the Sex Pistols, or the Circle Jerks. So, really, I never had that experience of having to defend my loud, aggressive music from the onslaught of my parents' critiques. Except once.

I remember I was sitting in my bedroom, playing my Generic Flipper cassette when my mother happened to walk past. I went to switch off the tape, anticipating some hallway-to-bedroom banter and, as it happened, cut off during "Sex Bomb" just as the saxophones were hitting their screechy crescendo. For whatever reason, my mother assumed I was trying to hide my music from her and I got -- for the one and only time -- the "if you're going to spend your money on garbage . . . " speech.

So, Flipper got to be the garbage band and Generic Flipper got to be the marker of the generation gap separating my parents from me.

This memory, in part, has earned Flipper a special place in my heart. The other part, of course, is that the album my mother thought was garbage is actually really, really good.

You see, Generic Flipper is one of those wonderful disks that emerged out of the early years of the punk scene, unencumbered by the rather restrictive stylistic conventions that would come to dominate the genre as the 1980s American punk scene coalesced around increasingly fast, gritty-sounding hardcore bands. No, alongside Reagan Youth, Minor Threat, or MDC, Flipper sounds downright weird. Their songs are slow. There's hand-clapping. The sludgy influence of Black Sabbath is more than mere seasoning on the band's sound.

Still, they're undeniably punk. It's not like the Sex Pistols were a speedy band and the X-Ray Spex made the saxophone an acceptable part of a punk band's sonic arsenal. The Minutemen and Black Flag brought jazz experimentation into the scene and . . . well, you get the picture. What I am saying is that Flipper is one of those early bands that don't sound like a punk band is supposed to sound while sounding punker than almost anything passing for punk nowadays.

Although bands like the Melvins often get more credit for setting the groundwork for grunge, Flipper, in many ways, can lay at least as strong a claim to being the first truly proto-grunge outfit. Drawing upon the same brand of frustrated nihilism one associates with such SoCal contemporaries as Fear and the Germs, Flipper broods where their peers seethe, slowing tempos and moaning rather than spitting their despairing lyrics.

Still, despite their slower, heavier (and largely bass-driven) sound, Flipper exudes considerably more hope than do many of their faster, angrier-sounding counterparts. In "(I Saw You) Shine," for instance, Will Shatter sings of a friend encountering the same walls into which Dostoevsky's famed Underground Man claims man keeps crashing in his self-destructive confrontation with the absurd. Like Melville's Ahab, however, the speaker refuses to relinquish the hope of bursting through the existential malaise his friend seems unable to penetrate. In the end, while no light creeps through the chinks in the wall, the fact his friend managed to "shine" in his futile attempts at escape inspires the speaker to claw his way through the melancholy and confusion rather than wallow in self-pity. "The wounded deer," as Emily Dickinson tells us, does indeed "leap highest," it would seem.

Of course, elsewhere on the album, the lyrics espouse a rather stoic approach to existence. For example, in "Shed No Tears," one of the record's most immediately catchy tracks, the chorus instructs us to "shed no tears" for the violence in the world, insisting that "No tears [be] wasted / No sorrow, no pity" be bestowed upon that which is natural, that which is, ultimately, "No pity, no loss." With Schopenhauerean flair, Will (ha., no pun intended) maintains that we mustn't grieve for the suicide for "He has made his choice, the pain of life is great."

On "Life," however, Will admits that though he "too [has] sung death's praise," he's "not going to sing that song anymore," opting instead for a Nietzschean Yes:
Yes, I've figured out what
Living is all about
It's life! Life!
Life is the only thing worth living for.
Yes, life! Life!
Not to be left out, Bruce Loose adds his own brand of nihilistic songsmithing to the mix, as well. On the album's stellar opening track, we hear him ask a series of rhetorical questions ranging from "Ever want to cry so much / You want to die?" and "Ever think you're smart and then find out you aren't?" to "Ever see a couple kissing and get sickened by it?" and "Ever wish the human race didn't exist / And then realize that you're one, too?" before admitting "I have" and concluding, somewhat stoically, "So what?"

The stoicism continues on "Way of the World," a song Epictetus might well have sung had the Phrygian lived in the suburbs of Los Angeles. "The way of the world," Bruce sings, is that there will always be "hearts no longer beating," "eyes that cannot see," "fingers that cannot touch," and "legs that have ceased to walk." We simply have to accept that many of our "dreams [will be] left empty and blank," and our "kisses undelivered."

So, yeah, the nihilism is pretty thick on Generic Flipper, but unlike many of their their opiate-drenched descendants, Flipper does not wallow in their despair. Recalling Samuel Beckett's famous quip "[w]hen you're up to your neck in shit, the only thing to do is sing," Flipper chooses life, even if it stinks.

Highlights:

Track 1. "Ever." Ever try to clap your way into a better mood? Flipper has . . .

Track 3. "Shed No Tears." This is as close to a sludge-punk sing-along as you will ever hear. Though the melody is a tough one -- think of a roller coaster taking a particularly heavy turn -- you cannot help but to feel a bit like toe-tapping when "Shed No Tears" comes on the stereo.

Track 8. "Living for the Depression." A pretty straight-up punk song with all of Flipper's trademark SoCal disaffection.

Sobriquet Grade: 91 (A-).

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Circle Jerks: Group Sex

By Sobriquet Magazine on April 10, 2008 12:12 AM

Clocking in at an anemic fifteen minutes and forty seconds, the Circle Jerks' fourteen song debut album remains one of the most influential hardcore punk records ever recorded. Although vocalist Keith Morris (formerly of Black Flag) and guitarist Greg Hetson (ex-Redd Kross, current Bad Religion) may have more recognizable names and more famous bodies of work, it is Lucky Lehrer's frenetic jazz-tinged drumming that seems to drive Group Sex. That said, Keith Morris, whose drugged-out vocals alternate between constrained fury and bursts of outright frenzy (the bipolarity of which is perhaps best heard on "I Just Want Some Skank"), somehow manages to keep up with Lehrer's pounding and delivers almost as impressive a performance.


The album also features two songs originally written for and recorded by Black Flag: "Wasted" and "Don't Care."

Highlights:

Track 1. "Deny Everything." Twenty-eight seconds of the sort of paranoia-tinged ranting Keith Morris brought with him from Black Flag shouted over an impenetrable wall of sound. You really can't ask for much more.

Track 2. "I Just Want Some Skank." Remember Howard Dean's scream? Speed it up, make it sound even more insane, and add drums and guitar and you've got "I Just Want Some Skank."

Track 3. "Beverly Hills." Roger Rogerson's bassline manages to convey a sense of impending disaster without crossing the line into outright fury. Keith Morris crosses it.

Track 8. "World Up My Ass." This is about as snotty as hardcore can get. Play it loud.

Sobriquet Grade: 87 (B+).

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Social Distortion: Sex, Love, and Rock 'n' Roll

By Sobriquet Magazine on February 19, 2008 11:46 PM

When Social Distortion released White Light, White Heat, White Trash in 1996, I had a hard time imagining a follow-up album that wouldn't be disappointing. I mean, that was one hell of a record. In retrospect, it seems Social Distortion had just as much trouble figuring out what sort of album could live up to the ridiculously high standard they set with WLWHWT, waiting a full eight years before releasing Sex, Love and Rock 'n' Roll in 2004. Ultimately, Mike Ness and crew produced an entirely worthy successor to their mid-nineties masterpiece.

Stylistically, Sex, Love and Rock 'n' Roll resembles White Light, White Heat, White Trash in its polished, extremely radio-friendly sound. While the rockabilly and country/western elements so prevalent on their albums after Mommy's Little Monster (1983) remain central to the band's style, Sex, Love and Rock 'n' Roll, like its predecessor, is a straight-forward punk rock record with cowpunk undertones (rather than a cowpunk record with punk undertones), and a masterful one at that.

As usual, Mike Ness's plaintive vocals deliver the band's trademark themes of regret and longing in the sad, almost wistful sing-along style he's perfected over the past thirty years.

Highlights: The difficulty in selecting stand-out tracks on an album like Sex, Love and Rock 'n' Roll is in the elimination. For a record as consistently solid as this, it almost sounds like a greatest hits album...

Track 1. "Reach for the Sky." The album's lone charting single remains one of the band's most representative songs. Lyrically, the song mourns a life in shambles while expressing a melancholy fear that the future "may never come," leaving the singer to embrace his present circumstances, diminished as they may be. Musically, the track balances the band's roots rock sensibility with their punk influences as perfectly as any song in Social D.'s discography.

Track 2. "Highway 101." In this bluesy tune, a wounded, hardened heart accepts love again-- along the California coast.

Track 4. "Footprints on the Ceiling." One of the album's more overtly country-influenced songs, "Footprints" is beautiful dirge for lost love.

Track 7. "Winners and Losers." Ah, sweet, sweet regret.

Track 10. "Angel's Wings." Co-written with Jonny Wickersham, "Angel's Wings" includes some of Ness's most upbeat lyrics. A sublime love song without sappy sentimentality, this track celebrates the rare variety of love that emerges midlife, after wrinkles appear and mistakes have been made. A tough guy ballad no tough guy would be ashamed to play.

This is the sort of record to play at, like, three in the morning when you're having one of those strangely profound conversations that come from nowhere but change your life irrevocably for the better.

Sobriquet Grade: 95 (A).

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