At the start of this year, we were thinking a lot about punk rock – actually, we think about it all the time. It’s a big part of the music we grew up on, but these days it’s far more than nostalgia bringing us back to our favorite genre. While though sticking to your clique and like-minded people can be a danger in itself, punk rock really helped us not feel completely alone in our values as we did our best to survive the public school system.
We don’t exactly remember those days fondly – we will never forget our first day of high school after moving to the godforsaken lands of southern Utah from Los Angeles, where within minutes of the bell ringing we witnessed one kid slam another into the lockers, lift them by their lapel, and shout, “fuck you, you dirty Mexican.” Both of those kids were white, and for years, the only real solace we found was whatever we could blare from our headphones as we tried to get through those crowded, godless halls. Things eased up somewhat socially around the time we got to college, although we were insanely mixed up with substance abuse, vandalism, and just about everything we were not supposed to be doing. Things came to a head after getting arrested, but believe it or not, that’s kind of where math rock entered the picture for us in more than a passive way, strangely changing our trajectory forever.
We started to explore weirder things like prog, post-hardcore, djent, jazz… you know, the stuff we love to talk about at Fecking Bahamas. We moved to Oregon, started playing in bands, and the rest is history. So now that you have a bit of personal context, we just wanted to let off one final salvo of punk rock records the give math rockers a run for their money. It’s all in good fun of course because we’re basically an entertainment platform, but consider this – these records keep things musically stimulating while reminding people that they’re not alone, the kind of songwriting sustenance many math rockers could only dream about, no offense. In a world where ignorance is celebrated, majority does not equate to quality… to loosely paraphrase Fat Mike.
We know kids are out there at this very moment struggling with the exact same situations we did, and to be honest they are probably suffering a lot more than we ever did. This one’s for them – we know it’s not a lot, but we hope that it helps. We know it helped us.
Special thanks to Patrick Lamb of Punkrock.blog for the first two iterations of this column!
NOFX – “The Idiots Are Taking Over”
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Let’s just kick it off with some Fat Mike right here, right now – as loud, proud, and cantankerous he is as a person, he’s also one of punk rock’s most under celebrated bassists. As a front person for a legendary band, the guy always seems to get his due, but it’s only recently we’ve been seeing people talk about his creative bass playing enough. The scorching triplet… thing from War on Errorism is genuinely difficult to comprehend at first, let alone pull off (is that a pun), echoing the chunky brilliance of fellow bass maestro Joe Raposo from RKL.
Conflict – “C.R.A.S.S.”
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It’s not even up for debate, “C.R.A.S.S.” is one of the crunchiest anarcho punk nuggets you can find. It’s a raw and rugged stream of consciousness that demands attention, but one of the things that makes it so repeatable is its strange sense of timing. The beginning almost feels like a compound meter situation – there’s a 4/4 but there’s also something like a 6 or 7/8 happening for a couple lines, and then completely devolved into what sounds like a prison riot for the last thirty seconds or so. We love to see it, er, hear it.
Descendents – “Everything Sux”
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It shouldn’t surprise us to see just how many bands were touched by Descendent’s incendiary, constantly shifting suburban screeds, but it does. Not because we don’t enjoy the hell out of everything they’ve done, but because for a band associated with so many straightforward peers, they always stuck out as a black sheep in terms of melody and rhythm. “Everything Sux” seriously breaks things up with punctuated hits, key changes and more, somehow lending a non-linear, all-encompassing feeling to this one minute and thirty second opus.
The Pieces of Shit – “Kook of the Day”
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Our fucking boys right here. When we first started interacting with TPOS, we thought we were honestly the victim of some insanely elaborate troll being perpetrated by The Robot and Me. What ended up happening is us getting to know some of the finest, most egregious, most hilarious punks we’ve ever met. Even if we hated them, we’d have no choice but to keep them around because these songs absolutely slap. Imagine if after Insomniac, Green Day continued to double down on the filth that made them unique, solidifying their place in punk as opposed to selling it – that’s kind of the best way to sum them up to the uninitiated. Even if you cringe at the comparison, it’s one of the few that needs to be said, because that’s the level of unfairly catchy material TPOS seems to have up their sleeve. If Billy Joe and co can go down as one of the most influential songwriters of the 90’s on the shoulders of Dookie alone, in a perfectly imperfect world, The Pieces of Shit would be logical heirs to their porcelain throne.
Predecased – “Scene Parole”
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One of our favorite UK punk acts around, Predeceased have carved a unique space for themselves with raucous, rafter-shaking songs that spills through adjacent genres like blood in a coliseum causeways. Though we’re pretty partial to their tribute to MF Doom, “Scene Parole” does a great job showing off the band’s uniquely tense, tightly woven chaos, as well as one of our favorite lyrics from 2023: “violate scene parole,curtains pulled on rigmarole, ozymandias had a band, had his records pressed in sand, looked at his work with despair, left the scene boundless and bare.”
Viagra Boys – “Slow Learner”
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Sweden’s best dressed punk export since Refused offer up far more than a sharp aesthetic, even if at first you can’t be sure if it’s just irony or not. While audiences in the U.S. most likely first experienced their hit “Sports” through a bizarre and hypnotic music video, songs like “Slow Learner” show off the jazz influenced side of the band with a really interesting ten-count on the bass line while the drums drive in 4/4.
Minutemen – “Do You Want New Wave or Do You Want the Truth”
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For all punk music’s collective vitriol, it also has some moments of deep introspection when you look deep enough. One of our favorite non-sequiturs is Minutemen’s peaceful two-minute interlude from their classic album Double Nickels on the Dime – without being explicitly about anything in particular, it manages to be this profoundly unique moment in time that not only feels progressive but also like one of the missing links between folk music and the punks, beatniks, and poets inspired from it in the 70’s and beyond.
Codefendants – “Abscessed”
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So, this is a band whose story is so fascinating it deserves an article on its own, but for now that will have to wait. That being said, members of Zeta, Get Dead, Pavlov’s Bell, and NOFX join Ceschi Ramos to create an absolutely volatile mix of hip-hop, punk, and dub. No two songs of theirs sound quite alike, which means every time something comes out it’s going to keep you on your toes, but we’re still hooked on “Abcessed” because it neatly presses all of the defining elements of the project into a dense, highly addictive three-minute banger.
Bodyjar – “Calling Orson”
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This song is always liable to make someone chug a cold brew and throw their body through a wall if it means matching the energy. In fact, if you’re unfamiliar with Bodyjar outside of their Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 contribution, “Not the Same,” get ready for a discography of mind-blowing, heartfelt tunes that mix in a ton of odd-metered parts and head-turning key changes. It was only a couple years ago for us, so don’t be embarrassed – just embrace it.
The Armed – “Masunaga Vapors”
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How could we not? Of course the best band in the world should close out this column, there’s a high probability that without records like Only Love and Ultrapop, we wouldn’t have even thought to run this thing. It had been a long time since we felt like the envelope had been pushed when Only Love came along, at least in such a complete way – imagine sticking a fork in the electrical socket, dying for a minute, coming back to life, screaming about it for a second, only to realize you’re actually miles above your body somewhere in the atmosphere. Atmospheric mathcore abounds as you realize you’re everyone, everywhere… now that’s solidarity, ain’t it?
Honorable Mention:
Billy Talent – “Where is the Line?”
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So, we were about done with this whole thing when we remembered something: a while ago we saw Yvette Young bring up the criminally under-analyzed Billy Talent, and it immediately took us back to the days of our very real fascination with Ian D’Sa, the band’s guitar player. Simply put, compared to a lot of his peers, D’Sa was miles ahead in terms of complex, diminished chords and fuzzed out, compound meter lead lines. For those first couple of albums, Billy Talent had an absolute chokehold on kids who wanted to get into bands like Fugazi or At the Drive-In, but needed something more palatable / in tune. As time went on, their music did get a little more fedora friendly, but they put their money where their mouth is to this day when it comes to the lyrics, and D’Sa still runs in circles around most people that claim to be classically trained.
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