After 20 years of poking fun at things, even Pissed Jeans’ ‘adulthood’ albums can’t deliver on-point outlooks without the occasional teenage mindset. Then again, greater wisdom only provides better evidence for why the world’s large-scale problems and inconveniences should be blamed on other humans. Growing older makes their hilariously vitriolic slice of punk more pointed, particularly in the unbelievably jam-packed gusto of Half Divorced.
Life events from marriage to money troubles to fatherhood to divorce are universal and prime material for satirical mockery, which are conveniently in Pissed Jeans’ wheelhouse. Vocalist Matt Korvette justifies their return after seven years with a record that has “an aggression within it, in terms of saying, I don’t want this reality […] I’m already looking elsewhere”. Whereas last effort, the gloriously threatening Why Love Now, provided a self-critical takedown of toxic white male masculinity through acerbic humour (masterfully filtered through Lydia Lunch’s comedy of menace production job), here everything that’s questionable, weird or boring in modern life gets placed in the firing line for the band’s incredibly noisy stand up routine in a far more frenetic scattergun fashion.
For one, Everywhere Is Bad is exactly what it says on tin: listing shit places growing in order of shitness from major US cities to the Arctic Circle to heaven, ramming the point home to devastating effect like a comedian after a few scotches. Even the band’s proclaimed attempt to make a pop-punk record feels like a joke. Sure, the peppy drums, chordal riffage and gang vocals of Anti-Sapio may be Bad Religion-like, but that’s about it. It’s rollicking as all hell. So is ‘boxing bout on speed’ opener Killing All the Wrong People, which manages to end quickly while feeling like it’s been raging at you forever, disclosing straight away that these guys dislike lots of people for lots of reasons. After all, “people are more hideous than monsters”, as growled in their snug-fitting Pink Lincolns cover here.
For all the dreadful people Korvette and co. have an issue with (“you’re a helicopter parent, figure it out man!”), there’s even time to make two different songs about car parts. One, a remarkably pacy speedracer of a hardcore track (where “to become a human torpedo!” couldn’t be a more fitting line), the other swaggering along toward a funny vocal effect. Sixty-Two Thousand Dollars In Debt feels as genuinely maddened by the capitalist rat-race as punk music’s best, while Moving On’s fist-pumping rally call is actually rather beautiful.
And for all the speedy sub-two minute thrill rides, Helicopter Parent features a bass riff that lurches like a camel and carnivalesque instrumentals falling out of sync with each other. The humour never runs dry, even down to the Wurlitzer guitars that channel Fred Willard’s ‘He Layeth On High’ sketch from I Think You Should Leave before everything sticks together for a finale that feels like bashing a microphone against your head. Junktime (at an elaborate five minutes long!) tells of the nightmarish arrival of “a brand new saviour” after a butane tank explodes. As bizarre as it is, not much sums up the world’s grim realities like “deriving exotic fruits from engine wastes / a little more soot than usually found in my diet / but you know me, I just had to have a taste!”
Delivering another gnarly, grimy house show sort of record, Pissed Jeans sound like a group of blokes that wish they’d never left the basement. It’s a riotous razor-sharp critique trying to rationalise a big old mess we all inherit, attempting to make it seem quite funny for at least a few minutes, before remembering it’s all crap again. For all the happier tunes to listen to in order to feel free from reality, nothing really beats cracking up at the stupidity of catalytic converters, Santa Claus and moisturiser, does it?
For fans of: Fucked Up, Viagra Boys, Chat Pile
‘Half Divorced’ by Pissed Jeans is released on 1st March on Sub Pop Records.
Words by Elliot Burr
