If you want to know what working as a claims adjuster for an insurance company can do to the male psyche, Pissed Jeans may just have the answer. It is not pretty, melodic and beautiful music, but it is an album that grabs you by the throat and tries to rip your soul from you. This album has its frenetic, thumping punk heart on its sleeve and from the first distorted chord it grabs the listener and takes them back in time to the hardcore punk of the late 80s and early 90s.
This is not a one-dimensional punk album, though—far from it. It leaps from the brutality of tracks such as
A Bad Wind straight into the rather quietly haunting
Scrapbooking, a song which sounds as though it is the words of a man finally failing in his fight between reality and dementia. Or at least a man fighting, and losing, against the demon inside his soul.
Scrapbooking was a highlight of this album for me, purely for the fact it hits you coldly, like being slapped in the face by a stranger as you take out your week’s stresses at a club. It is little subtleties such as
Scrapbooking that make this album work.
I don’t know if it was the general stress of being in a part-time band with your pals from school or just that he did not think the band were going in the direction that he wanted, but one of the four band members, bassist Dave Rosenstraus, has left Pissed Jeans since the album was recorded. Whilst he has been replaced by Randy Huth, who has known the members for some time, you have to wonder if the band’s sound will now change due to the loss of one of them and, therefore, if the direction the band were going with this album has now altered.
The band are not all serious and whilst it is not always easy to understand the gutteral style of singer Matt Korvette, take the opportunity to tune your ears to his screeched vocals and you may find that not all is what it appears on the surface.
I’ve Still Got You (Ice Cream) has Matt refusing to let life ruin him and he shrieks that however bad things get he will always have a tasty frozen treat to fall back on. This may seem like a writer treating lyrics as pointless, but I don’t think this is the case with Matt Korvette. I suspect he is simply a realist. Most people have something they turn to for comfort when life it not so fun or has upset them, whether it is beer, hugs or even ice cream. I get this sentiment. If life throws you a curve ball, you get dumped or face a work disciplinary or fall over in front of the one person you want, most people don’t go and hit something until they bleed, they eat chocolate or drink beer or buy a family sized Ben & Jerry’s. Matt Korvette knows that humour can come from pain, hurt and anger and this album allows him to showcase his humorous nature well. Matt Korvette may yell that he is not a people person over and over again on the first track of the album but he is wrong. He understands people very well.
Hope For Men is for everyone who needs a release from the everyday mediocrity of life. It is an album to laugh at and, more importantly, with. It is for all the small indignities we face every day. For all the times we trip up in public or bash our legs against an office table. For the times when we just need an escape from the dullards that we are forced to spend hours with when we just want to be with the people we want to spend our waking hours with. It is an album to remind us that whatever life brings us, things really are not so bad.
Oh yes—and there is always ice cream.
The album is available to buy now. The band (shock horror) do not have tracks from this album on their MySpace page and appear to have not updated this for some time. However,
I’ve Still Got You (Ice Cream) can be downloaded via the record label’s page for the band at
www.subpop.com/artists/pissed_jeans http://www.whitedenim.com/pissedjeans/
