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.

Day 67: Rancid – …And Out Come The Wolves

Some music sets a precedent in one’s life. One’s first exposure to something vivid and remarkable can flash so brightly that its afterimage blinks back for the rest of one’s life. For me, Rancid was one such exposure. I remember being a curious, hyper child, sitting cross-legged, inches from the TV, watching Saturday Night Live. Rancid appeared and played “Time Bomb“. I had never heard anything like it, and I can reconstruct it on my mind’s canvas to this day. Consequently, Rancid is still what I think of when I think of punk rock — even though I know by now that they’re probably more ska than anything. But the towering mohawk, the clothes, the sheer enthusiasm forever came to be the template against which I check any punk band I encounter. For better or worse.

Surprisingly I had never heard this whole album then. Unsurprisingly maybe because I generally really don’t like punk, but still an odd oversight. Turns out, unfortunately, I wasn’t missing much. Every song on here is pretty good, and is so distinctly Rancid: Merging the kindest parts of ska and punk into high-energy pop that rebels without making much of a fuss, that focuses lyrically on things of substance without making it obvious that they’re even doing that — it turns out to be the spiritual predecessor to the pop-punk of the late 90s/early 00s. The problem comes in the fact that each some firmly sets this template well enough on its own, but none seeks to contradict or surpass any of its neighbors. Each song sounds so similar that making it through all 19 tracks becomes highly tedious and mostly unrewarding. There are moments of musicianship and surprise but they are seldom enough that it’s hard to have any faith that they’re coming. The end result is, for me, a self-contradictory album. There are enough peaks here for a good album, but there is just so much muddled, rote, assembly-line songwriting obscuring them that it’s easy to lose sight of what makes this good. Put this album on in the background on shuffle and it’ll probably soundtrack a raucous afternoon just fine. Maybe like, driving around a crowded mall parking lot trying to find a parking spot for half an hour — that would be perfect for this album. But to just sit down and listen to, I don’t know.

Day 9: Guns Up! – Outlive

I always found hardcore kind of a confusing taxon. See, I got into it way, way late, when it had become mostly about people getting together in camo shorts and kung-fu fighting during breakdowns in songs. I didn’t realize it had ever been anything but. So when people talked about liking hardcore and then went on to say they liked bands like Black Flag, I got a bit confused. Now I understand a bit better that there is windmill-punching hardcore and then there is hardcore punk.

Guns Up! falls into the latter category. It’s pretty straightforward: medium-to-upbeat tempos, very crispy guitars, and a vocalist with an impressively controlled scream. By the way, it’s nice to see, from looking at that video, that kids at shows these days don’t even wait for breakdowns to start hardcore dancing.

This really exemplifies why I find music criticism such a frustrating idea. I’ve long been interested in it and wanted to write it, but I sometimes have no idea how to approach it. See, an album like this, it’s hard for me to review objectively. For my purposes, as an album in my life, I would give it a very low score. I would almost never want to hear this unless I was using my fists to defend a woman from an attacker or outrunning an angry dog.

But you can’t write reviews about how you don’t get it. That would be terrible. I’m only getting away with it because of the context of this project. To be a critic, you need to create some kind of context. You need to be able to compare this in some way to the other hardcore that’s come out in the last decade and judge how it compares. If this had been the first hardcore album ever, it would be incredible and revolutionary. It would be purely unique. But it’s not. It’s another entry in a crowded genre, and its merits and detriments need to assessed as such.

Here’s what I think is meritorious: their songwriting is sharp and concise. The songs bound out of the gate and into rollicking verse/chorus/verse, smashing full-bodily against you, occasionally slowing down to run you through their power-chord meat grinder. They don’t dawdle; they pummel your eardrums. Their sound is tight and well-produced, with instruments that duel between the left and right channels in your headphones. It’s exciting music, and it could definitely get me all brutal and sweaty if I were at a show.

I say their songwriting is concise, and that’s definitely a back-handed compliment. The reason that’s a plus is because, despite the fact that it’s fun in a kicking-a-soccer-ball-around kind of way, the music is repetitive. Thankfully the songs average 2 minutes long (the album is 11 tracks at 22:35 length) so the limited scope of their musical ideas never makes itself too obvious. If the songs were 4 minutes long I might have hated this album; as it is, each song is over before it gets too wearisome, like getting raped by a premature ejaculator.

I suppose if I were a real music critic, I would be much better versed in every genre, or failing that, would do a lot more in-depth research into the context of the album. I would be able to tell you that Guns Up! sounds like Gristlechop crossed with Spiked Collar Crew but with less Tallahassee hardcore and more Rhode Island crunchcore, or some other shit. I’d sketch out a nice word portrait of what the music sounds like, and since you’d know reference A and reference B, you’d independently figure out whether it was close to things you already know you like, and decide from there whether you wanted to give it a shot.. What I actually think about the music would have very little to do with it. The rating, between 1-10, would indicate not much more than my “dude, you should check this out” meter.

Unfortunately I’m not a music critic, so all I can tell you is this: this is a perfectly good album for some people. I’m not one of them.