Day 86: CKY – Camp Kill Yourself, Vol. 1

Some hooks are so good that you can hum them note-for-note despite not having heard them for years and years. In that respect, CKY’s “96 Quite Bitter Beings” is right up there with “Another One Bites the Dust“, “Can’t Stop“, and “Arpeggios From Hell“. When I was but a youth huddled in front of a diminuitive television and trying to unlock everything in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3, I used to just listen to this song over and over and kickflip my damn thumbs off. That damn riff became more familiar to me than anything.

Anyway, I guess they had 4 LPs, including this one. I always used to idly wonder, “is the rest of that album as good as that riff?” I was skeptical.

Well, the answer is “noyes.” While on one hand I can say after listening to Vol. 1 all day that nothing else on the album is as brilliantly catchy and as gripping as “96 Quite Bitter Beings”, I can also say that I’m kind of an asshole for saying that, because as the first paragraph of this post suggests, it’s borderline impossible for me to hear this album as the entity that in my head has taken shape as CKY, the unstoppable guitar-rock hitmakers behind the 3rd most catchy song I can recall off the top of my head (which claim would collapse if you asked me to recount nos. 1-2 off the top of my head; I would stammer, unprepared for this eventuality, not wanting to say “Take Me Home Tonight“, which I predict would be the first thing to come to mind).

I always used to hate the sludgy, plodding middle third of 96QBB. It was tiresome and refractory. I needed the riff again. But maybe filling the middle with the riff, too, would have been too much? Maybe they were very wise in starving the core of their great song of the ¡ and ! with which that magical riff encased the song.

Hours and hours later, well, there’s no more of that riff in this album. That doesn’t make it bad, but it does make it suffer in light of my presumptions about it. What you get instead of a riff that the CDC probably still gets phone calls about is a short-feeling-long sludge-rock anthem machine. CKY’s 2nd single from this album was “Disengage the Simulator“, and it’s hard for me to see any commonalities between the two singles. “Disengage” does have a catchy riff, but it’s in the background, and the reverb-cushioned vocals take center, left, and right stages. I’m struck by the similarity between this track and early-00s nu-metal crooners Flaw, actually (“Whole“), and I don’t doubt that these guys’ were an influence, perhaps indirectly.

Vol. 1 is a mixed experience, in every sense — stylistically it’s untrackable, from “The Human Drive (in Hi-Fi)“‘s sexy 70s guitars, to the stoner-rock sludge of “Knee Deep“, to the rich folksy storytelling of “My Promiscuous Daughter” (“I caught my daughter giving head to my brother / What can be done with my promiscuous daughter? / I can’t be down with my promiscuous daughter”), they sound keen on experimentation, which for some reason actually works out. The album never becomes stagnant, and never tries too hard to sound unlike itself, leaving the whole thing kind of an angry Tasmanian cloud that blows by and you’re not sure what the fuck.

Postscript: The Wikipedia article for this band is highly amusing, and paints these guys, perhaps unfairly represented by their own words, as pretty serious dicks.

Bruni was fired from the band in February 2000, after four years with Miller and Margera, due to his general abilities and performance on the Warped Tour, with Ginsburg taking over live bass duties until later on in the year. Bruni’s tenure with the band had been questionable throughout, with the band choosing not to tell him they were recording an album until near the end of the process (resulting to his contributions to “Lost in a Contraption” and “The Human Drive in Hi-Fi”). Responding to a question from a fan in 2002, Ginsburg described Bruni, simply, as “boring”. Attempting to justify Bruni’s exclusion from the recording of Volume 1, Miller suggests that “he wasn’t quite good enough yet [to perform on the album] and he did not have enough money to contribute to the cost of recording.” Miller made it clear that there was no “bad blood” between the two, although Ginsburg has said that Bruni “sucked and wasn’t rock”, also labelling him an embarrassment.