The ProblemAddicts/Kevin K Band/Silver Alert

Thursday, March 29th 2018

The Bends, St. Petersburg FL

DETERMINED OPENER: Leadfoot Promotions is here to give the Tampa Bay music scene a kick up the arse. Well, okay, there are punk gigs every two days so it appears on the surface at least to be quite healthy, and every time you don’t go to one of them your “Support the creative underground!” sensor flares up, sending pain down your leg and pangs of sellout guilt into your brain, suggesting a strong community might be bad for our personal wellbeing whether we schlep to the venues or not, but, well, is the quantity of events really a good barometer of strength, of the relationships we might be building as an alternative to an atomised society of selfish dick behaviour, and by god, where’s the headache medicine, and the beer?  This began so forthright. Perhaps if kicks turn out not to be necessary, we can ask Leadfoot Paul to contribute foot massages to some of our more loyal, exhausted and seasoned punk patrons (he seems a nice enough guy).

His concern for the elders is evident from the offset here, with boisterous locals Silver Alert named after a not-at-all condescendingly titled public notification system for missing dementia sufferers.  Certain members seem to relish the day they can legitimately cause such trouble. Bassist Ryan has a continuous father-son dynamic going with guitarist Chris, hinting at a desire for ageing in both, while their other guitar player Brad is mocked for having a mic that makes him sound “like the teacher from Charlie Brown,” i.e. completely indecipherable to the whippersnappers.  The sheer loudness of their instruments leaves them all as incommunicado to us as Peanuts children, but that doesn’t mean their songs are childish.  People Bubble is a reasoned warning against global overpopulation (a problem that the elderly are making more efforts to solve than any other age group), while another is a timely number about Condoleezza Rice, though whether it’s in relation to launching your own skin care products made from crude oil spoils and Iraqi blood is left unclear.  Ryan should really be wearing a Fuck World Trade shirt in that case, instead of late Clinton administration entry Rock the 40 oz.  Silver Alert’s final absurdly fast song is All My Friends Are Hipster Kids, dedicated to the clientele at The Bends, and it bears an uncanny resemblance to Oi To The World by goof-masters The Vandals.  Was it ever hip to like them? You can find some of these on the band’s collection of golden oldies, White Toyota Solara.

I saw Kevin K Band here at what I will soon begin calling the Kevin K Bends just 3 months ago, but this time, perhaps because not drained by the holiday season, they’re an even more alert and confident solid block of rock than before.  They make the kind of pre-hardcore punk that these days is barely considered distinguishable from rock ‘n’ roll, which, perversely, actually makes them stand out at many of these DIY gigs. Fun is what’s fun and that’s fine, but I feel a lot of bands starting out could do well to remember that there are speeds below Mach 1, that you can make something decent but different that still falls within the “nebulous big tent” of the genre (as I saw it described in a recent zine, Bleach Everything).  On the other hand, Kevin is playing a particular style from his own youth, so maybe I should shut up.  Sub-genre straddling visionaries Bad Religion are present on the drummer’s shirt, depicting a Trump and Putin reacharound session [see footnote for scheduled Russia commentary*].  Kevin K & co. perform Russian Roulette for good measure (maybe they could back it with their tune American Nightmare), and a true to form deafening interpretation of These Boots Are Made For Walkin’.  They end as if they’re closing down an arena show, with a guitarist shredding crazily and flashing lights.  The kickoff song for tonight was Justify, a cut from their new album; being careful with their MDC-style acronym-flipping, the band released Too Much Too Sun as Kevin K and the Krazy Kats in March.

Because I am a shallow fraud and apparently can’t write about a set without commenting on the artist’s threads, I’ll get it out of the way up front this time.  Punk-O-Rama pirouetting to Pennywise is The ProblemAddicts’ stand in bassist, foreshadowing the revved up cover of Stand By Me that would materialise (I attempt to shout “Do it Fletcher!” at the accurate moment, but miss my chance). These incredibly thankful and friendly chaps from “Orlando-ish” Deltona do indeed face problems, such as finding out they share a name with a rap crew in Massachusetts who play with the likes of Ghostface Killah, though with the Florida act sharing a stage with Agent Orange a few weeks ago it’s hard to say who would successfully lay claim in a legal battle.  Drummer Billy, fresh from cutting a hole through his finger at work the previous day, cuts thumpingly through the wall of string instruments, guiding my attention more than once, and I’m sure that’s not just the Coffee Blonde Ale in my veins making a mental connection with his Caffiends shirt (Orlando’s answer to Milo Aukerman).  A kind enthusiast buys the band some beers, and amidst the tiny performance area filled with noise Paul gingerly uses his lead feet to deliver them, including all the way to the drum kit spot in the back. It’s within all these altruistic vibes that a closing rendition of True Believers isn’t overly worried about being “cool,” and you remember the DIY arena is indeed capable of making community out of nothing, even if only temporarily.  The ProblemAddicts put out their EP Derailed (which sounds a lot like Pennywise when they’re doing good quality) in February, and you can hear it on Spotify.

 

* My disdain for the “blame Russia” narrative is high (recently vomming all over my review of Great Collapse’s Neither Washington Nor Moscow… Again!), and I am pretty sure Bad Religion used to be a band that were against war and actions that risked it.  But in the moment I have myself a chuckle, because at least it’s an improvement over the BR shirt that it seems to be a take on, of two half-naked nuns making out.  What the fuck is with Greg Graffin?  First that whole having a wank on webcam fiasco, now this?

Superchunk

What a Time to Be Alive

Merge, 2018

For a good while I’ve had the concept for a music magazine feature rattling around in my head, even as we’re told over and over that the magazine industry is as dead as a punk rock dodo.  The idea is to comically juxtapose profiles of two artists with similar names but completely different backgrounds, that you won’t want to mix up when trying to build your nerd cred: Goldfinger and Goldfrapp; Gorilla Biscuits and Half Man Half Biscuit; 7 Seconds and S Club 7; you get the point.  I’ll be waiting by the phone for you all to jam the line insisting that I bring the project to life.  A particularly satisfying pairing would be Superchunk and Supertramp.  Aside from the fact that both bands make me want to eat a hefty breakfast, I don’t know a great deal about either.  Over the years I gleaned that Superchunk were acclaimed alternative “dahhlings” who were considered the most obvious inspiration for The Get Up Kids’ anthemic, clean emo pop.  The chaotic yet easygoing approach to record acquisition led me to investigate these claims only recently, with the help of their eleventh studio LP What a Time to Be Alive, released in February.

Often, backtracking influences are a little hard to pick up on, at least without doing some surrounding research on specifics.  While taste does change and mature, if you’re in the middle of a love affair with the protégé band, it’s not unusual for the influencer to sound like a less developed version of the elements that you’re into.  Not so much here.  From the opening moments of the title track the comparison between the two acts is obvious.  Even at the age of 50, Mac McCaughan has that same kind of awesome, joyous, tenor voice as The Kids’ Matt Pryor.  The hooks are a bit less bold, but it’s pumping and high-inducing.  The drum intros, the sad little bridges; great stuff.  I would have liked this at 15 but probably not adored it.  It heavily resembles Something To Write Home About except there are no ballads or over the top cries of romantic love, meaning it punches out a full 20 minutes before the UK version of that album (it was two songs longer than the U.S. release, apparently.  Ending on I’ll Catch You not Central Standard Time?  Rubbish!) 

What a Time to Be Alive has no time for ballads because when variety calls it dips the other way towards brevity.  The two-word average and “on the tin” appearance of many of the titles in the tracklisting looks like an old hardcore one: super chunks you might say.  Lost My Brain with its feedback intro and barely absent chorus, and Cloud of Hate’s no-nonsense dismissal are the most clear examples of this sugar-sprinkled hardcore sound, but the pacy Reagan Youth spells out the intention before you even listen to the record.  “Reagan Youth taught you how to feel/Reagan Youth showed you what was real/But to tell the truth, there was more than one Reagan Youth” sings McCaughan.  A touching placeholder for the Dave Rubinstein tribute album that Paul Cripple has been promising for years, perhaps Superchunk are saying we’re all still children of that defining time, with current dunderheads created via the inbred lovechild of microwaved Reagan-era social conservatism and dissatisfaction with the poverty-breeding “globalist” policies of nonstop neoliberalism. 

The band have stated that WATTBA is a direct response to the Trump era, but mercifully his name is absent from the lyrics.  And speaking of runtime and Central Standard Time it brings up an interesting conversation about whether artists should be striving to discuss timeless topics or not.  On the surface a record that takes this approach will age better than one full of bleeding heart pleas, or a band named after a President who eventually left the White House (in body if not in ideology).  But I think time capsule media can be just as interesting or insightful to future generations of listeners or viewers.  Sometimes an artist needs to stop worrying about their legacy and make something that is useful for now.  If it’s such a time to be alive, let’s hear something that makes me feel empowered instead of depressed that I’m even thinking about it. 

Superchunk must get this or they wouldn’t be making this tilt towards the most immediately gratifying of genres, but they’re as bored and sick as we all are of fighting the same fights over and over.  I Got Cut, for example, is about reproductive and medical rights.  “Family Planning/Free Chelsea Manning,” things that basically already happened, but you never know what the hell will try and roll back around the next corner.  The song was released as a 7” last summer to raise money for Planned Parenthood, with some cool one-of-a-kind sleeves and a cover of Up Against The Wall by Tom Robinson Band on the b-side.  The band confronts the duelling desires to shrink back or step up to fools who think Earth is their big playground with All For You: “Fight me/I’m not a violent person but fight me.”  A battle cry for emo kids.  Also basically how I feel every time I hide in my living room and fire up Halo.

Speaking of Halo, there’s an amusing story that ties into this album’s early listens.  A few weeks ago, the missus and I, as we often do of a weekend, were getting trashed and preparing for a mass killing by shooting digital motherfuckers in the face (as any dipshit who takes money from the NRA can tell you, these games can teach you exactly how to operate a real machine gun, which is why they recommend going to the firing range baked out of your head to replicate the online experience).  These events are the closest I get to DJing at the moment, so I plonked on What a Time to Be Alive, and proceeded to drunkenly waffle on to my ever-patient girl about how great it was and how much it resembled the punky alt-rock that we both grew up with.  We had gotten to track 10 or 11 before I realised that I’d misjudged the stereo and we were actually listening to chapter one of The Emo Diaries, a compilation that came out on Deep Elm Records in 1997.  It features early Jimmy Eat World, Samian, Triplefastaction and a gaggle of decent bands no doubt lost in the cornfields of the Midwest before I had chance to ever investigate them further.  Music critic of the fucking year. 

Don't hold it against Superchunk though.  I’m now more familiar with the album, and it really is its own beast.  While the overall flavour here is as American as a supersized, super-pink milkshake that I may or may not be craving from staring at the pink back cover, there are also all these moments that remind me at least of swathes of English rock.  These moments bridge the oddly rigid divide between the many strains of punk-influenced American alternative and mainstream UK indie.  McCaughan is like Bernard Sumner (New Order) with his ageless boyishness, and is also not a thousand miles from the cheeky pipes of Gaz Coombes of Supergrass (ooh, there’s another one for the mag).  Sticking with Sumner for a second, All For You has a lengthy Joy Division-esque bassline in the intro, and sticking with bass intros, Bad Choices starts with notes that seem to be lifted wholesale from an interlude in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels known only as “bass riff”.  I’m no bigger fan of Guy Ritchie than the average person, and this doesn’t even qualify as a full song, so bugger knows why I remembered it.  But it is pretty damn English.

Careening back up North, it’s just a coincidence, but a few songs showcase words with hard extended “a’s” that leave McCaughan sounding like Lee Mavers from The La’s: “There’s a crooked line that runs through every crease in this maaap/You want to take us all the way baaack.”  Maybe it’s the North Carolina way too.  You can enjoy it on the chorus of Break the Glass, a cut about hammers that thankfully doesn’t imitate the “granny rock” of Maxwell’s Silver Hammer by that other famous Scouse group.  A couple of tracks have this warbly, strained guitar that suddenly ducks to a lower tone that puts me in mind of Lowgold, one of the meeker acts of the post-Britpop field in the late 90s, which is saying something when you consider how meek that entire field generally was.  There’s probably a more noteable comparison but I can’t think of it.  They also had a rather shit string of luck as a band, if not as unconventionally awful as that of Reagan Youth.

I’m struggling to find much at fault with What a Time to Be Alive.  This many albums in you have to know what you are doing to make it worth a damn, and these people clearly know how to deliver.  Erasure is not a bad tune, but may be a tad slow and minimalist in the middle of the record, which otherwise has a really fun arc.  I’d prefer if, at some point at least, the politics went deeper, rather than being scattered about vaguely.  WATTBA is not going to set the world alight, but it’s a dependable quality melodic rock listen.  If their other ten releases sound similar to this, I can’t imagine it’ll be necessary to get them all.  But I’ll no doubt casually grab a few more going forward, and this seems as great a place to start as any.  Super stuff.

You can buy the album from Merge Records here and stream it at Bandcamp.  Superchunk will be doing a few dates in the U.S. throughout April and May then Europe starting in late May.

A limited edition acoustic 7” featuring the tracks What a Time to Be Alive and Erasure will be released on clear vinyl for Record Store Day 2018 (April 21st).   No link, ‘cause get your arse to the local shop.

Great Collapse

Neither Washington Nor Moscow... Again!

End Hits, 2018

It will probably come as a surprise to anyone I’ve rumbled with online lately, but my lifelong instinct to closely follow and engage with all the fucked-up shit going on around here has taken something of a nosedive in our brave new world era. Annoyingly, the main exception is the one crusade being waged not by the obvious villain, but ostensibly against him. That issue is the Russiagate conspiracy theory that is threatening to kill us all.

What we might call the centre-left has always been something of an easy target for us radical punk types, but this time the rank and file has been taken for such a ride by the establishment machine that it continuously beggars belief.  Exactly when the comfortable majority of the country should be united in straightforward opposition to this crackpot administration, vast numbers have been convinced that a foreign nation they haven’t much considered in decades is to blame for their entire situation, from throwing elections to tricking black activists into believing in racism.  Aside from a whole bunch of smoke, mirrors and yelling, evidence is still thin on the whole thing, but that’s not what’s most significant. What matters is that it doesn’t fucking matter.  I don’t want to die because of American hubris regarding the supposed undermining of their thoroughly corrupt joke of a political system.

All of this misplaced, bullshit pressure is forcing Trump to try and show that he’s not in the Kremlin’s pocket: Russian outlets are being forced to register as foreign agents, U.S. arms are being sold to Ukraine, NATO has expanded in membership, Russian soldiers are being killed by American-backed terrorists in Syria and nuclear threats are escalating.  If the two leaders are in cahoots, it’s pretty fucking well hidden.  Conspiracy-pushers either ignore all of this or twistingly incorporate it into their paranoid argument.  Whatever the Russian government may or may not have done is orders of goddamn magnitude below what the world’s most violent state has achieved during its sordid history, so you need to get over it and focus on the real injustices.  If this goon was nudged over the line by something happening elsewhere on the planet, the problem is that he was so close to the line. YOU made Trump. Deal with it. Don’t point your gnarled finger at the outside world. Do not ally with power-hungry Democrats and the FBI and leave the rest of the world holding the bag of radioactive ash.

Short of getting people in power who aren’t total dickheads, what we need is a punk album -- or any decent album frankly -- that unashamedly blows the fucking lid off this entire scam to end humanity in the name of status quo control.  Finally, he gets to the music!  I’m sorry, but I just can’t emphasise how much this whole thing pisses me off, in a way that almost makes me feel youthfully vibrant and full of conviction, to be honest. On that cue we have Thomas Barnett of Strike Anywhere, Chris Chasse of Rise Against and some blokes from a few other relatively well known bands releasing their new album Neither Washington Nor Moscow... Again! They are Great Collapse, and the relative quiet around this release mirrors the absence of mainstream dissenting voices against the new cold war rather nicely.

The title is an homage to the 1986 album Neither Washington Nor Moscow by York’s The Redskins (as in socialist/solidly left skinheads; their previous incarnation was called No Swastikas). The Redskins were a punk scene act, but this was a soul and rockabilly album that sounds like it could have influenced everything from Jamiroquai to Howard’s Alias.  You will probably not be surprised to learn that Great Collapse don’t incorporate any of this into Again! or anything really beyond the normal melodic hardcore tropes.  For this reason, I initially felt that this was going to be good for little more than a few background spins, rehashing a sound that was already struggling by the time Strike Anywhere and Rise Against became a rock club double act in all our brains.  At times the music swells and you can feel that old rise in your chest that used to happen much more easily. You want to grab a shitty beer in an even shittier plastic cup and do a jump kick.

Digging in, there is some original and interesting stuff here, mostly in the second half.  Southern Exorcism for example has a great final third, going down in a winding drive that I really like.  But as I just said, while Change may be a Sound, the sound aint exactly a-changin’, and most things of note are to be found within the subject matter.  If we don’t go out with a bang, the other thing that is likely going to put this experiment of sentient life to rest is environmental devastation, touched on with Patient Zero Comes Home.  This neglected topic is normally left to north-of-the-border agitators like Propagandhi and Oi Polloi, and the song seems to channel the same feeling of hopelessness present in much of Propagandhi’s recent output (“Something I struggle with now is that I think it’s all over,” Chris Hannah said in a recent interview). Barnett yells from the outset: “We are pariahs of the anthropocene” (the current geological age where humans are the primary influence on the global environment).  As the title suggests, by now it feels we’ve been doomed since the first lump of coal was burnt, and like we have little control over the destruction of our lifestyles: “The billion born past our means / Condemned condemned condemned / Not free!”

This is one of many references across NWNM...A! to history, and how we as people are heavily shaped by it or choose to interpret it. Perhaps if we were better at understanding the importance of our history we might not find ourselves at points like the present.  Take the Nazis. One of the easiest moments to pick out comes in the segue between Who Makes and Atomic Calender: “Listen, Nazi: Never Again!” (a Poison Idea lyric).  These butterbrains were once a blindingly easy target arguably used by punks and anarchists in an eerily similar way to how Hollywood uses them to tell easy stories with simple baddies, and avoid more fruitful, uncomfortable conversations with more complicated topics.  But now, with the political momentum shifted their way, we’re forced to cheer for apparently necessary entertainment that is saying stuff once so basic as “fascism sucks.” The idea that under overtly right-wing governance is where punk music thrives is a bit of a depressing statement on the political limits of the culture. To what extent does the so-called mainstream left have to imitate their apparent opponents for artists to get as angry as they do at organically right-wing nutters?

Which brings us back to McCarthyism and the New Red Scare. NWNM...A! doesn’t really do what I would have loved, i.e. lid blowing.  Direct confrontation of specific contemporary issues was never really the style of these guys’ former bands.  On the plus side, the title could easily have been making a false equivalency between Washington and Moscow, sending me into another wild off-music rage.  Or worse: it could have been playing into the conspiracy! The lyrics make occasional reference to the East, but in general aim to clean our own house in the West, to Great Collapse’s credit.  Opening lines: “Like the dogs of Western culture!” I’d like to state at this juncture that none of my opinion on this should be read as any particularly strong support for the Putin government, or Russia in general.  In the league table of violence, they are high up there with us. Again, the point is I simply don’t want to die. The original NWNM was so titled because Britain would have likely been the testing ground for any initial Soviet attack.  That’s why UK Anarcho-punk bands in the 80s were obsessed with annihilation and apocalyptic imagery. We reject being blown to pieces in the middle of your war of supremacy.  This middle finger to major powers or nationhood itself seems to be more where Great Collapse are coming from.

Aside from the UK-inspired title, Great Collapse seem to have a heavy foothold in the even more Iron Curtain-laden Berlin.  I almost thought they had moved over there. The only substantial information I could find on this release was from two German interviews, they tour there a lot, and the label End Hits is based there (it’s also, irrelevantly, the name of an e-newsletter of “bangers, rippers, hits and jams” by Toronto’s super-funny, weird corners punk journo Sam Sutherland).  While not simply about Russiagate, the album does have a lot of Armageddon themes (Escape Velocity, closing things out, is also about the end of the world.  Thank god you can imagine posi lyrics over these sorts of riffs).  And while the band did put out their 2015 record Holy War on the label as well, End Hits is darkly perfect for this one, because in Berlin and York, as in nearly all other places, war is still a potential memory.  To the United States, formal, internal war has been an abstract concept for a very long time.  I suspect this is part of why many Americans don't get my fear of Russiabaiting, and why certain spineless European leaders are trying to pull the same stunt on members of their own forgetful, gullible populations.

While themes are discernable, the songs attempt to jump around internally.  Reading the lyrics on this is a bit like reading those interviews that had been translated presumably from English into German and back into English by me: you get a general idea of what’s being said, but not the clearest one.  I always found even Strike Anywhere a bit impenetrable. Considering I “like words” maybe I should have spent more of my life getting to understand the basics of the John Cooper Clarke punk-poetry diaspora. (On the Exit English track Blaze, Barnett quotes the Peterloo Massacre-themed poem The Masque of Anarchy, for goodness’ sake.)  And while it took me a few listens to get into this, I’ll admit that it’s probably difficult to push yourself or the genre forward artistically without making your words less on-the-surface.  I might be in the minority in looking forward to the forthcoming Pennywise album, but it’s not for the literature.

It’s ironic that a record so initially unspectacular had me contemplating globetrotting politics and centuries of events.  So in partial correction, there is a fair bit of content to chew on here. But it’s under layers of overly-familiar instrumentation and some wordy ambiguity.  You’ll know whether you want those things or not. If Great Collapse are as concerned about the end of everything as their name, label name and a lot of this material suggests, it’s strange that they didn’t take the chance on some sort of fresh, desperate musical direction à la the originally titled album.  Then again, when you’re facing the end, it’s not unreasonable to crave the comfort of the familiar. 

Buy Neither Washington Nor Moscow... Again! here. Listen to it on bandcamp here.