This review was never finished, but is being posted for the scraps of satisfaction that it might provide. "Last edit was on November 16, 2018." Perhaps culture historians will use these unfinished insights to speculate on my writing methodology, and how it inevitably led to my dying as a penniless critic. An actual complete review can be found by our man Tony over at Apathy & Exhaustion.
Pennywise
Never Gonna Die
Epitaph, 2018
This link is for Jim Lindberg. If somebody knows how to get it directly to him, do us all a favour and make sure he reads it. Not only will it give him a litany of alternative terms for “hypocrisy” such as insincerity or casuistry, he can click the dictionary tab to make sure he actually comprehends what it means. He wrote a really decent book once, so he should be able to manage this problem he seems to have. The entire band might contribute lyrics, but ultimately, the singer is responsible for the words he spews and any inability he might have to tell his bandmates that they are California goofballs. Thesaurus.com: never set out to write without it.
I come out swinging with this criticism because there isn’t a whole lot else that I dislike about Pennywise’s newest album, Never Gonna Die.
Perhaps all his girls are now old enough (the first was born around Full Circle) to start hating his guts and he’s remembering that youthful energy much more fervently.
Bottomed out with Reason To Believe. Kinda like the common view of the punk “explosion” itself. Seems to have come out of nowhere, but if you look closely, it built up over time. PW have been gradually improving their game throughout the decade. Making a recovery at all is hard for most artists, and their evolution through the 90s was slow, so I think it's impressive. It’s like the band made a ridiculously un-punk 10-year plan for getting back on top after coming to terms with the barrel of dishwater that was 2008’s Reason to Believe: record one album with a new singer, then record old songs with the old singer, then finally one of new material, and for fucks sake, take time doing it. You can’t expect to just effortlessly dump something out like it’s 1993 and you’re still full of youthful vigour. Pennywise here have taken their craft seriously instead of phoning it in. They have reached inside and found some of that old magic. It sure makes those of us who have increasingly seen the band as a guilty pleasure feel vindicated for not chucking them completely out of rotation.
Not that it particularly dampened my enjoyment of you at the time, Pennywise, but thanks for doing your least impressive work when I was in the optimal punk early 20s age bracket. Really appreciate it.
You wanted their output to mature with you.
Highlight goodbye bad times.
The topics were never really the issue as much as the uninteresting way that they were delivered. The key here for non wordies or less wordily inclined is that I am loving most of these grooves without checking the album sleeve. She Said in my opinion is a bit weak, a lightly spruced up version of a mid-career song with its warbling
Buried at track 11. Slipped in there - racists and trolls in the title track, little rioting Banksy piece on cover.
Trump. Never entirely understood the right-wing association with PW. Their rebellious but mostly spade-is-a-spade lyrics could be interpreted by different kinds of folks, which in itself is no bad thing. Was it because the 90s, the skate punk golden age, was also the pathetic high watermark of modern American liberalism, when Clinton was shoving through firebrand progressive policies like shitting out subsidized corn over Mexico and molesting young women? The only thing dumber than die hard fans of the Democrats is conservatives who don't see how right wing they are. Their unwillingness to really confront this audience is evident in the both the low volume and choice of quotes here: a Trump supporter could hear them, guess that on average the band is not his biggest fan, but still not hear anything that bothers them or makes them confrontational. Yes, Trump is slyly admitting, when he says he “loves the poorly educated,” that he is manipulating a perhaps ill-informed segment of his base. But he’s also appealing to those people, the ones given few learning opportunities, dumped on by neoliberalism and that the alter-globalization left failed to convince with decades of summit hopping.
The name refers to racism and hatred and stuff, but you know there were plenty of sneers. “Those clowns are still around?” or “are they really trying to reference the most overused statement about the status of a genre in the history of human expression?”
Not exactly Eminem but you can judge the political climate by how willing Pennywise is to alienate some of their hymn bros.
Middle age, not just pretending to be young (Time bomb)
Blue album cover quality.
You can hear Never Gonna Die in full on Youtube.
