Anyway, a while back I got to see Fuck You Pay Me at The Pinch in Washington DC. They were great and I immediately picked up their new LP titled "Public Disgrace" when they finished their set. The album cover is pretty cool with a picture of earth wearing a gas mask and the state of Ohio in one eye and the Russian hammer and sickle in the other. I love creative artwork like this because it grabs your attention right away.
Let me first say that I was greatly disappointed when I got home to see that there was no download code for this record. Total bummer! (I found out later that you can get it on iTunes). Despite that, I put that record on my turntable and played it over and over and over again for weeks. This record fucking shreds!
Beyond the kickass tunes, the songs cover so many different topics. Topics like daddy issues to reality tv to bands that have an insane amount of merch to sell at shows. They even do a cover of Religious Wars by the Subhumans. This may be blasphemy to some of you, but I think this cover is way better than the original. I tried to get into the Subhumans years back and I wasn't feeling it. At the end of the day, if you haven't listened to anything by this band, you're missing out!
Adult Crash wants to add his two cents to this record.
Erba sounds like the Heir Apparent to Choke from Slapshot. Same strangling vocals. Same plain-spoken nuclear lyrics. In regards to a song like Daddy Issues? Erba needs to be a little pickier with his Tinder dates. None of that would've happened if he had only gone through eHarmony. All in all, Malvo is right, this record is great.
Let me continue our little record review with the new World Be Free Lp. Malvo and I are split on this one. Allow me to give you my thoughts on this one first.
No doubt these guys are old hands at hardcore. It's clean and well-produced, which is why I probably find it sterile and boring. For me, when it comes to hardcore, the beauty has always been in the blemishes, listening to new musicians figure things out as they go along. It's why I tend to like demos and debut EP's over more polished later releases in the discographies of many bands I've followed over the the years.
With World Be Free, these guys all know the formula for hardcore on a larger indie like Rev and because of that, I don't hear anything remotely new or interesting that makes my ears perk up. In fact, I'm all but certain I'd find the recordings from their practice space (if there are any) more interesting than these songs - because at that stage of the writing process, I'm certain things were much more organic and whole. Like potatoes vs. potato chips.
Like Adult Crash said, we are split on this one, but not by much. I agree with him that it's really polished and lacks any rawness. Kinda like everybody's favorite debate of which Gorilla Biscuits record is better? The 7" or the LP? It's obvious to anybody with any common sense that it's the 7". Not that the LP isn't any good, but the 7" is just that much better because it's not so clean.
Having said all that, I am digging this record. At first I was a little iffy about the vocals, but by the time that I got to the end of the record...I was putting it on again to listen to. I like Scott's vocals in Terror, but he sounds a little different here. Not in a bad way, but I guess I just didn't know what to expect? I got this record without listening to any promos of it. I just knew that there was some supergroup that people were talking about that was on Revelation. I wanted to be surprised and I was. Pleasantly surprised to be exact. Is it the record of 2016? Too soon to tell, but it's not a bad way to start the year. Check them out and see for yourself.
D.C.S.
