Mclusky - ‘No New Wave No Fun’ from Mclusky Do Dallas (Too Pure, 2002)
THERE IS NO OTHER BETTER WAY (TINOBW)
It’s over a decade old and drenched in (mostly ironic) machismo, but this is the kind of record I’d love Silence Yourself to be.
(Source: Spotify)
Hot Water Music - ‘Call It Trashing’ from A Flight and a Crash (2001)
“Something react with a shake and a bang to resurrect a dead beat, rhythm of a slant and a pose of chivalry that’s far from its best, so over-rated, so bits and pieces, accelerated, and so deceiving … Wait, it’s all sounding the same. Rehashed beats and break downs, surround and take the diversity away and make it all feel stale and vacant. Wait, it’s all sounding the same. It’s all charades and shadows. Call it trashing”
My #1 favourite album and my favourite-sounding record. Oddly enough, it sounded impenetrable and ungraspable when I heard it first. I obviously liked something about it enough to stick with it, though, and when I read along to the lyrics it opened up the sound for me. I think it was one of the first albums where I started to hear bass guitar a separate sound within the songs, not just as intro - particularly since it has such a wonderful guttural quality here.
It all just seems to have such a perfect balance: as I hear it, the guitars chime with the high end of the drums and cymbals, the vocals are typically throaty but don’t overwhelm the mix and sit comfortably in the middle, while the bass rumbles alongside everything else. I guess that might have been the cause of my initial difficulty: everything being on the same level, so that it takes a bit of close listening to ‘unlock’ the sound and unfold its structure. The loudness can be a bit fatiguing - less so I think on vinyl, or through headphones with competing sounds? - but conversely if you can immerse yourself within it it becomes very rewarding.
I can’t proselytise enough about the sound of this album and the quality of music in it, but the strange thing is that I think the follow-up, while having similar songs, sounds terrible. A Flight and a Crash was the first of three albums Hot Water Music released for Epitaph Records, all produced and recorded at Salad Days studios in Baltimore by Brian McTernan. Caution has an extremely noticeable thin drum sound, that I’ve seen described as “plastic bucket syndrome”. It’s not completely absent from A Flight and a Crash, but it ruins the later album for me (or at least, although it has some very good songs on it, I rarely want to listen to it specifically). The New What Next has a similar enough drum sound too, but it matches it with quite compressed-sounding guitar so it adds to the experimental feel of that album, which works.
In the other direction, the album immediately preceding A Flight and a Crash is the Walter Schreifels-produced No Division which has a solid if unspectacular hardcore sound, with rolling drums and buzzing distortion, that perfectly suits the musical intent. Before that, the band recorded with Steve Heritage, a relationship which Eric Grubbs in his POST oral history of post-hardcore recounts as ending somewhat tensely with Forever and Counting - a record I always really liked the sound of it, so it surprised me that the band didn’t, although the explanation might be more to do with context:
“I just think it sounds like dogshit,” [Jason] Black says. [Chris] Wollard insists the songs sounded great in the studio, but when they got the record, they didn’t like the way it sounded, especially with its limp bass sound. “To us, it sounds fuckin’ horrible, and it’s probably because of the bad taste in our mouth,” Wollard says.
I think it definitely has some of the same thinness in the drums as Caution, and I guess consequently a lot of heaviness in the mid-range, but for me that always worked because of how stretched-out the album’s songs feel, particularly in the guitars. But go back to their classic Fuel For The Hate Game, and the balance of A Flight and a Crash re-emerges albeit with a lower sonic fidelity (everything fuzzes, and the bass, instead of a guttural rumble, sounds like it could almost be played on a keyboard - but that’s punk authenticity for ya). For a band that get criticised for sounding the same a lot, I hear a good deal of (admittedly subtle and probably interpretative on my part) variety in their discography.
(Source: Spotify)
Yeah, so Titus Andronicus and Local Business are both pretty interesting (kind of a survey record of various kinds of American punk/pop-punk, which is - minus the Springsteenisms - what made me think of this) but this is still by far the best punk album of the past five years, perhaps even longer.
(Source: Spotify)
The For Carnation, ‘Emp. Man’s Blues’ from The For Carnation (2000)
Another album (now added) I had forgotten about for my Pitchfork list. I think at times I liked this even more than Slint andSpiderland itself.
Interesting challenge, although I didn’t spend too long agonising over it, to come up with a list based on albums from a) Pitchfork year-end lists and b) Pitchfork reviews originally. I only used the write-in option for two of my favourite punk records (and favourite records overall), and also for Refused’s The Shape of Punk To Come which I guess wasn’t so well-known when it came out. If there’s one album missing it’s Ham Sandwich’s Carry the Meek or White Fox, but it seemed futile to write in Irish albums - which exist in a parallel track to my interest in predominantly US-based punk and indie - although there was one of my favourites in their review database.
your-melancholy-baby asked: How did you get into punk music? :)
Completely randomly. A friend’s brother, I think it was, listened to Green Day, and I didn’t really listen to anything, so it seemed like as good as place as any to start. So the first CD I ever bought was Warning, and then I worked it out from there.
Mclusky - ‘whiteliberalonwhiteliberalaction’ from My Pain and Sadness is More Sad and Painful Than Yours (2000)
Mclusky - subverting the language of pornography since before their second album Mclusky Do Dallas (2002)
brianmlatimer asked: Given the amount of writing you've done on Hot Water Music, I was curious to see if you'd had anything to say about The Draft's 'In A Million Pieces' ? Looking through the archive I couldn't find anything, and while a line of comparison between it and HWM's 'Caution' could be drawn pretty easily, I (for one) am interested in hearing any thoughts you may have on it - provided that the aforementioned similarities didn't leave you unimpressed to the point of dismissal.
I’m afraid that’s kinda the case… except I already see Caution as a quite specific outlier in the HWM oeuvre, which peaks for me with A Flight and a Crash and then dips, but picks up quite considerably with The New What Next, an album I’m quite fond of (possibly because it’s the one record I got to experience on release while already a determined fan of the band). The Draft album isn’t really bad by any means, and arguably sounds better than Caution, but I’ve just never warmed to it. I’m not sure I’m competent of identifying exactly where the difference or differences lie, but being only 3/4 of the full band, I definitely think it lacks the roundedness and multi-layered structure that defines Hot Water Music for me in general, and an album such as The New What Next in particular (given the high production values, the mature writing style, the general air of a band with a lot of achievements behind them). I was told by a friend who picks up these things a lot faster than I do that In A Million Pieces had some very good songs on it, but it never grabbed me the way HWM albums (except for, until recently, Caution) did with their complex appeal.
As it happens, I’ve never had the fortune to see Hot Water Music live, but I did see the Draft and the Bouncing Souls perform as a headliner for one of the first gigs I ever attended in Dublin. The Draft were reasonably impressive - I was only getting the hang of live music then, however - if alarmingly drunken, so I guess you could say I got a slight taste of the HWM experience, but on that night it was the Bouncing Souls who I was definitely there to see and came away a true believer.
Thanks for the thought-provoking question!
Hot Water Music - ‘Alright for Now’ from Caution (2002)
This is always been my least favourite HWM album, but I’ve just been realising what I’ve always known, that it has a lot of really good songs on it. I’d post the opener ‘Remedy’, but the drum sound really annoys me (it suffers a lot from ‘plastic bucket syndrome’ - as does the whole recording to a degree, but mainly this song) - though equally I was almost going to do it just for the line “I strip the gauze for rational self-analysis”. See, Caution is an especially psychological album; as are all their records, but I think it’s at this stage that that element is most accentuated.
My taxonomy of Hot Water Music albums (after the first, Finding the Rhythms, which is self-explanatory) goes as follows:
and incidentally, that’s not following the titles, which shows they are quite good at naming their records in line with apparent lyrical and music themes.
“How was your weekend?” That is the actual line, I had to check the lyrics to make sure. I’m not in the mood to dissect it any further, to be honest I’m not sure they would even benefit from such an action, but that plaintive, existential response “I’m alright for now” sums up everything that needs to be summed up.
Vinyl Sunday: Husker Du, Metal Circus; Hot Water Music, Never Ender (with artwork by SINC); Punch, s/t
from All Ages Records, Camden Town
