Pissed Jeans evoke the spirit of acid punk
Pissed Jeans. Great name. It's so outrageously wrong that it's weirdly genius. And the band's new album Hope for Men has been on my stereo for weeks. It's a noisy affair that immediately recalls the acid punk noise terrorism of the 80s underground when we were on brink of taking the noise revolution to the mainstream.
After the fall of the three-chord punk and after the extreme of NYC's No Wave, there was Jesus and Mary Chain, Swans and Sonic Youth. They were all brilliant, but then noise music mutated into something else: 'acid punk', a futuristic, psychedelic mash-up of three-chord punk rock. The sound had its genesis in Black Flag, specifically the song My War, and Dead Kennedys.
With its biting black humour, twisted-up sounds and outsider stance, acid punk gave you the opposite of U2's famed "three chords and the truth". Instead, it gave you the anti-truth. And the figureheads of the movement were San Francisco's Flipper, whose album Generic was the crucial record in acid punk's foundation, and whose true heirs Pissed Jeans seem to be.
Working through a 'so bad it's good, so bad it's bad, so surreal it's real and so slow its not punk rock' blueprint, Flipper concocted a Black Sabbath-meets-Black Flag mess that spawned an entire genre of bands: Happy Flowers, Bunny Brains, Butthole Surfers, Pussy Galore, the Melvins and early Nirvana all carried some echoes of their sound. The first live exposure I had to acid punk was in the mid 80s when I was playing bass for Primal Scream and the Scream opened for the Butthole Surfers, of whose twisted sounds Bobby Gillespie was a huge fan. The Butthole Surfers were funny and brutal. Listening to them was like having a 24-hour Warhol moving playing in your head. If you listened for any stretch of time you felt as though reality had somehow been distorted.
Still, the best thing about Pissed Jeans is that they seem uninterested in talking about influences. They sprung from an insular music scene in Allentown, PA. As a small town punk band they've had room to develop free from the pressures of both the underground and the mainstream. The bands in Allentown create rock'n'roll out of boredom. They cram themselves into a basement called Jeff The Pigeon and play for kicks. They don't cop the NYC and LA avant-garde scene and they are refreshingly indifferent to rock'n'roll cliché. Lead singer, Matt Corvette doesn't hide his day job as an insurance claims adjuster. They don't want a Myspace. They don't want downloadable screen-saver wallpaper. They don't have a masterplan. In 2005 they went DIY and self-released a debut album Shallow on their White Demin label. With song titles such as Ashamed of My Own Cum and I'm Sick ("IIIIIIIIIIII'M SIIIIIIIIICK! / I GOT A HEADACHE! / I HAVE A FEVER! / I GOT A RUNNY NOOOOOOOOOOSE! I GOT DIARRHEA!), Shallow has the black humour entirely absent from those endless Warped Tour emo bands.
Who could listen to a Butthole Surfers record, a Happy Flowers cassette or Flipper's Sex Bomb and not get off on the essential FUN-NESS of their music? It isn't a hipster deconstruction of punk rock, it's a raw-powered reconstruction of everyday life on record. Shallow is confrontational and funny. It's like eavesdropping on private psychiatric sessions. After its release it became an accidental cornerstone in the acid punk canon. And it's inevitable that a release so good and raw is eventually going to lead to a much wider audience for Pissed Jeans.
