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New
Rockin' DVDs for Fall By Mark
Prindle Reel
Big Fish The same goes for Reel Big Fish, the band! This Orange County punk-ska band has done the impossible -- made me (who doesn’t like ska even a little bit) smile, laugh, and finally understand why people like ska so much. The band members just seem to be having so darn much fun up there! They seem genuinely friendly and honestly funny human beings. I was cracking up right from the beginning, when Aaron Barrett’s guitar cable falls out in the middle of the very first song and he (jokingly, but acting serious about it) demands that the curtains be closed and re-opened to make them look more professional. Then the curtains close and re-open, at which point Aaron acts absolutely HORRIFIED that a stage hand is still up there with the band, correcting a faulty pedal connection. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?!?,” Aaron demands in a strikingly Bob Odenkirk-like manner. When the band starts up the first song, he whine-yells, “I’M NOT READY!” See, that’s just my kind of comedy. Self-importance
is a sin as far as I’m concerned, and these guys clearly don’t
have an ounce of it. This humor is strewn all throughout the show,
which itself is comprised of about 20 bouncy, fast, loud punkity
songs with a horn section keeping it skaey. And that’s how
I insist on adjectivizing the word “ska.” If you like
ska, you’ll love this DVD. And it seems to me that even if
you don’t like ska, you’d probably get a good piece of
cheer out of this release as I did.
Guttermouth Guttermouth is a speedy Orange County Epitaph-style punk rock band led by a real dumbass who thinks he’s funny, but isn’t at all. He bounces around the stage like a moron, wears ironic thrift store clothes, “sports” (that’s a verb, I’m told) a Strokes haircut, and yet is clearly about 40 years old, judging from all the wrinkles and laugh lines on his face. Where he finds the self-confidence to make fun of people in the crowd while looking like an old businessman having a midlife crisis is beyond me. The music is pretty solid speedy punk rock, with
some nice unexpected breaks into slower straightforward hard rock.
Lyrically, they have some quirky ideas going on -- “Can I Borrow
Some Ambition?,” “Mr. Barbeque,” “Bruce Lee
Vs. The KISS Army,” etc. -- and this is perfect for kids who
like NOFX and that kind of thing. The singer is at least ... interesting
to look at, if a bit depressing. The rest of the band is more visually
appealing, especially this guy in a hockey jersey who kinda looks
like a girl until you start making love with him.
Anti-Flag Political Johnson! That’s what you’ll find on this sixth album by Pittsburgh’s punk rockers Anti-Flag. They play hard rock and metally riffs every once in a while, but the politics are strict left-wing hardcore anti-war goodness. Looks like George W. Bush is doing such a shitty job, he’s become a Reagan-type figure for a new generation of disgruntled and disgusted punk rock youth! The very first track accuses him of being a Turncoat, Killer, Liar and Thief, and this attitude continues through such great anger anthems as “When You Don’t Control Your Government, People Want To Kill You,” “Sold As Freedom,” “Mind The G.A.T.T.,” “Operation Iraqi Liberation (O.I.L.)” and “You Can Kill The Protester, But You Can’t Kill The Protest.” A lot of people reminisce about the early days of
U.S. hardcore punk, back when we had REAL enemies like Reagan to
yell about. Well, look again, youngsters. The current administration
is as corrupt or even MORE corrupt than that one in oh so many ways.
I’d hate to think anyone would need a hardcore band to point
this out to them, but if such is the case, you can’t do much
better than Anti-Flag. They want to educate you -- let them! Better
Anti-Flag than Bill O’Suckacockly!
It may have taken them twelve years to pull it together, but FINALLY we get volume two of the prolific Weird World series! This is less a coherent collection of tunes or singles than a sort of “odds and bouncy” collection of leftover diamonds and wafers. Specifically, it includes remixes of two Condor tracks (WHY!?! Even if that album is out of print, it’s pretty darned easy to find!), early versions (NINE YEARS early!) of two other Condor songs, two warped industrial instrumentals from Denney Brothers solo projects, two alternate recordings of songs that appeared on the first Weird World, three cover tunes (Love, Link Wray and rockabillyer Hank Mizell) and five original Weirdos compilations previously unavailable on either of the two other albums. Also, a few of the tracks were recorded live and/or in demo stages, so sound quality varies drastically from song to song. Although, as I said, this album isn’t a terribly coherent introduction to The Weirdos, it is by far their most diverse release, whipping back and forth between sparklingly kickass modern-production hard rock, bare-bones Cramps-style scumbilly, rambling crankly punk rock from the earliest days of the genre, out-of-tune bass oddness with synth fuzz, pop-punk from Heaven and surf-spy from Los Angeles. Though I love nearly every track on here, I’m a bit disappointed by the track listing. There are still several Weirdos songs that are not available on any Frontier release. I imagine this must be due to problems getting permission from former record labels, but if you’re a fan, surely you feel the same frustration I do sitting here listening to barely-remixed versions of Condor tracks and a garage quality run-through of “I’m Not Like You” when I still have no clue how “Big Shot (In The Head),” “Hit Man,” “Idle Life,” “Why Do You Exist?” and “I Feel” might go. I should also note that this here earlier version
of “Shining Silver Light” is a 5000% improvement on the
already-great Condor version. Unlike the distorted guitar punk-metal
action/ reaction of the newer version, this 1981 rendition bops
along lopily on bass and synths, a wonderful new wave merging of
sci-fi and surf-spy.
New
Bomb Turks After months of hullabaloo and braggadoccio about this hard-rockin' punk fiend band from out of town called The Hives, I finally up and bought a bootleg copy of Veni, Vedi, Vicious in Chinatown for $5.00, took it home and discovered that the hipster music world JUST discovered the appeal of what the New Bomb Turks were doing a decade ago. I don't need copycats in my collection, so I ate a bunch of Claritin and made the Hives go to HELL. With that minor irritant out of the way, it's time for a new CD by the world's greatest sweaty reverbed garage punk rock band -- Ohio's New Bomb Turks! (cheers all around, especially from that old bedroom wall of mine in Carrboro, NC that used to host a New Bomb Turks poster -- probably some girl lives there now and has a poster of a shirtless Ed Koch up there or some other teen idol) Wait, slow down the phone holds. This isn't a new studio recording et al! It's a compilation of unreleased and rare material. The highlight is four AMAZING outtakes from the last LP -- which is complete bullshit, because these four songs are as good as or better than ANYTHING on that album -- "Buckeye Donuts" sounds more like a Destroy-Oh-Boy!!! track than anything they've done in ages, "Bad For Me" is a terrific dark mid-tempoer with a surprisingly competent jazz combo breakdown at the end. "Law of the Long Arm" might be the catchiest Stones-style number the Turks have done, in addition to owning another classic "play-on-words" title. And "Sammer'd"! Please Louise! How could they have left this awesome SPY THEME instrumental off of a full-fledged album? What -- because it's instrumental? Yeah, I'll say it's instrumental! The CD also includes tracks from an unreleased Rocket Widget EP, songs recorded for a Devil Dogs tribute record, two from a European-only Blind Run 10-inch, a B-side to a single, etc. and so forth. BOTTOM LINE, as I like to quickly get to the point and not waste a lot of words on setup: Only six of these tracks are previously unavailable (or hard to find) original New Bomb Turks compositions. All six of these are top-of-the-line well-written energetic wonders of punk rock nature. A seventh track is an early version of "Statue of Liberty," never one of the band's better songs. And the other nine are cover tunes. That's MORE than 50% of the CD devoted to songs originally performed by other artists. Devil Dogs, Gaunt, The Knots (?!? some local band maybe?), Joy Division, Painted Ship, Aerosmith (Richie Supa actually, but most people know it by Aerosmith and I'm sure Richie wouldn't argue with that fact), X -- BUT THE AUSTRALIAN X!!!! and country/western artist Faron Young. Some of these covers are fantastic, others not quite
so interesting -- it really depends more on the quality of the original
song. Myself, I think "Death Of Mighty Joe," "The
Drawback" and "And She Said Yes" are absolutely horrible
songs, but I certainly can't blame Weber, Reber, Davidseber and
Breber for that.
Morbid
Angel That’s correct -- a THREE-piece! Presumably, that would be bass/vox, guitar and drums, except that a few of the songs feature acoustic terror and symphonic bombast as a break from the Morb Norm. But don’t think they’re one of those black metal bands with all the violins piled on top of the metal like Emperor or Kiss. Morbid Angel are loud, distorted, intelligent, and as thrashin’ as they are classically-influenced. And did somebody say “DRUM SOLO”????? Okay, I asked around and nobody said “Drum Solo.” That’s unfortunate because there’s a drum solo on here. ---- Reader Comments No Comments. |
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