While D.C. has a rich musical heritage (and still does), Takoma Park, Maryland, right over the line, doesn't exactly. The enclave, known for -- depending on your POV -- a hippy legacy of health food stores and that culture, or an eclecticism that is liberal and admirable -- is where Pissed Jeans recorded their new record. In fact, a song like "Helicopter Parent", a highlight of the new Sub Pop release, is one that would be sure to rankle the feathers of same in Takoma Park, had any of them heard this being blasted out of a recording studio there.
Pissed Jeans favor a sound that is both rootlessly primitive and linked up -- however tentatively -- with stuff like The Stooges, early hardcore, and garage rock. "Cling to a Poisoned Dream" careens at 100 mph towards a clift, while the superbly-titled "Killing All the Wrong People" nods in the direction of the kind of loud, unhinged stuff heard on SST in the early years of the seminal label. The excellent, propulsive "Sixty-Two Thousand Dollars in Debt" combines menace and despair to offer up one of the best numbers here on Half Divorced. At their best, like on the ferocious "Everywhere is Bad", Pissed Jeans find a way to make this stuff sound almost catchy.
Fans of the pioneeering bands on this imprint may find a commonality here with stuff like Green River and Mudhoney and Tad, but Pissed Jeans are more interested in laying waste to tradition; if they sound like any punk or grunge forebears, it's probably an accidental thing. What's good about this lot is how resolutely they champion volume and abrasiveness over making any of this too palatable. It's not likely going to shock anyone -- those days of rock doing that are over, I think -- but it's got spark and fire to it, and the whole thing blasts forward with a demented, zesty spirit about it.
Half Divorced by Pissed Jeans is out now via Sub Pop.
[Photo: Ebru Yildiz]