Pissed Denims: Half Divorced Album Assessment

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There was a time when each mundane indignity of grownup life had a corresponding Seinfeld episode. Now these indignities encourage grimly humorous Pissed Denims songs. Demoralized about our dehumanizing healthcare business? There’s a Pissed Denims track for that. Depressed about going bald in early maturity? There’s a Pissed Denims track ranting about that. Fantasizing about your blowhard challenge supervisor’s loss of life? These freaks have a track for you, too.

20 years into their profession, the Pennsylvania-bred punks are the poets laureate of pathetic males flailing towards their very own obsolescence. (That’s a praise—to painting a personality is to not concern your self with the character’s likability.) On Half Divorced, their first album in seven years, Pissed Denims haven’t overhauled their sound or reinvented themselves or “matured” as artists a lot as they’ve amassed a brand new stock of contemporary miseries to show into scuzz-punk tantrums, from catalytic converter theft (“[Stolen] Catalytic Converter”) to crippling medical debt (“Sixty-Two Thousand {Dollars} in Debt”).

Let different bands handle the political and structural causes of late-capitalist decline; along with his guttural howl, vocalist Matt Korvette has all the time been higher at sweating the small stuff. He’s in fantastic kind on “Helicopter Dad or mum,” yowling concerning the micromanaging tendencies of bougie mother and father (“Why ya respiratory down the again of their neck!?”) over a sludge-metal riff that oozes like overflowing sewage. It might be the funniest track about parenting since Randy Newman’s “Love Story (You and Me).” The band additional indulges its comedic facet on “In all places Is Unhealthy,” an amusingly particular travelogue of ills. The playful call-and-response section—enumerating completely different cities and the explanations they suck (“Philadelphia/Trashy streets/San Francisco/There’s no extra freaks!”)—evokes the humor-infused punk of the Lifeless Milkmen greater than any hardcore reference factors.

If Half Divorced has a declare at being Pissed Denims’ funniest album, it’s not their most musically stimulating. “Helicopter Dad or mum” and “Junktime,” a half-spoken yarn about poisonous waste fallout, are exceptions—sludgy, slow-burning eruptions that showcase the band’s expertise for pressure and launch, goaded by Korvette’s throat-scraping anti-charisma. The remainder of the document performs it comparatively straight, with fast and soiled hardcore outbursts like “Killing All of the Flawed Folks” and “Alive With Hate” that summon loads of bludgeoning power however little in the way in which of memorable riffs or refrains.

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