Four men surrounded by pink. The title: ‘Why Love Now’. It looks like a power-pop album. Mere subterfuge. This is the biggest swindle since the front cover of Throbbing Gristle’s ‘20 Jazz Funk Greats’. And it’s brilliant.
For their fifth full-length, Philadelphian freaks Pissed Jeans have peeled back the pink to reveal the oozing, omnipresent underbelly of society: the oddball at school, the under-appreciated manual labourer, the office nympho and more are given airtime on ‘Why Love Now’.
Pissed Jeans have built a career on being a sort of amalgam of Turbonegro and Godflesh, like Swans letting loose in a biker bar at happy hour. That’s never lost here and we hear both sides of the swinging, stinging axe before it falls upon our neck. This is caustic, uncouth, raw fucking noise.
This is filth. But it’s strangely accessible, catchy filth. The Bar Is Low and Love Without Emotion represent this multi-faceted approach, with the former the equivalent of the soul being sucked from the Duke of Nothing’s bellybutton and the latter embracing dashes of the Cure whenever Brad Fry’s fragile, glacial guitar lines break from the usual crunch.
And, make no mistake, this is a crunching, crushing album. Matt Korvette’s gurgled bellows make the Bronx sound like babies and It’s Your Knees is titled appropriately, opening the floor with a Mastodonian riff that’ll make your leg-hinges buckle and crumble. ‘Why Love Now’ is wiry yet weighty and that’s an awesome quality.
Yet, even among the feedback, screaming and scuzzed-up punk, the highlight actually comes from outside the band. Author Lindsay Hunter delivers a harrowing monologue on I’m A Man that strips apart the core of masculinity atop a pulsating industrial beat. It’s really unlike anything Pissed Jeans have spat out before and it’s a bleak snapshot of where they could end up.
Pissed Jeans remain a jizz-stained mirror held up to society, and now Korvette’s lyrics are even more potent, even more charged, given the selfie-Snapchat-#lads-like-my-post-or-I’ll-unfriend-you world they find themselves in. It makes for a very scary-looking future indeed and, should they pare back some of the melody to give way to that overbearing heaviness, the band could secure themselves a seat alongside noise rock royalty, if ‘Why Love Now’ doesn’t do it already. Why love now? What’s the point? Fuck, this is horrible.
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