The album Hope For Men holds out just what the title promises: a fighting chance for real, bare knuckled, angry male sourced punk rock, sung with an ubiquitously wry sneer. The native strain of that long neglected (and often parodied) genre couldn’t come a moment sooner; in a day and age when males of the species watch episodes of “The View”, talk about Rosie’s supposedly frightening politics, and have their own facial creams, there is an almost palpable screech in the ether for a return of something truly XY.
I can only imagine what the guys in Pissed Jeans would have yelled at Elisabeth Hasselbeck.
Of course, being from this side of the old pond, they’d likely yell something that would be easily translatable to the stunned American audience. Having formed in lovely Allentown, Pennsylvania, a steel blooded city if there ever was one, Pissed Jeans is a foursome of devilishly loose timbre fronted by corporate-whores-by-day Matt Korvette and Brad Fry. Their startlingly dynamic album Hope For Men opens with a sparsely aggressive, shriek filled piece called “People Person” a song which lampoons the two-faced, society types that fill the ordinary world. It’s a convincing message in tone, delivery and lyric, a derisive theme that might be said to make up the bulk of the ten songs. They go on to take on (with nary a moment’s rest) optimism (“I’ve Still Got You (Ice Cream)”) submission (“Caught Licking Leather”) and a pastiche of near surrealism (“The Jogger”). Korvette’s shrill, stress inducing voice is one for the ages, borrowing from Johnny Rotten it has the uncanny ability to quickly separate the wheat from those who won’t listen. This alone proves that Pissed Jeans aren’t out to make cute lifestyle statements – in four years songs featured here won’t play alongside primetime NBC retrospectives.
Is the hope in Hope For Men a sarcastic statement? I don’t know – don’t ask. It might just be trivial. A better question is whether or not there is hope in repeated listens for Pissed Jeans. The answer is definitely, resoundingly, hell yes there is. |