Making Friends With Your Problems: Pissed Jeans - King of Jeans

This album has been in heavy rotation on my various audio playback devices lately, and it’s a little hard to pin down exactly why. It is very much in the vein of other misanthropic lurching bands, with various pig-fuckery done in a vein made classic since Flipper (to whom they are frequently compared). However, there are some significant differences with both the lyrical concerns of the music and the more anthemic nature of the choruses—this is fist-pumping sludge, if anything. A greater degree of subtlety makes this ultimately a more pleasing exercise in song craft than the monotony typical of this genre. In fact, they make boredom sound positively nerve-wracking.

Much has been made of this band’s ability to invest everyday activities with an almost absurdly extreme pessimism, but one point I have failed to see mentioned is the reason this works in the band’s favor. While so many other bands have to struggle to maintain the shock factor of their aesthetic with increasingly lame and generic horror stories (sadly, e.g. Shot-era Jesus Lizard or Headache/Songs About Fucking-era Big Black), Pissed Jeans can fall back on a sort of “normal things are more easily exploited emotionally” approach, which allows them to tackle the same basic subject matter repeatedly: work, ennui, sexual decadence or what the woefully unimaginative narrator considers to be such. This is not to say that they are Bruce Springsteens of sludge, a working-man’s noise band, but it’s probably easier to re-write a twisted take on typical romance or an average shitty day than it is to continually rewrite a twisted take on a three-eyed baby that Anne Frank shat on the 6th of June, 2666, thus making their economy more easily explained.

Beyond lyrical aesthetic and the value therein, how do it sound? Well, I like it. That doesn’t count for much around here, but for what it’s worth, I enjoy it in a less-whine-driven-Shellac-y, slowed-down-Arab-on-Radar-y (sorta like their “O Henry”), more malevolent, less spastic Six Finger Satellite-y (perhaps as covered by the Melvins) sort of way. The opener, “False Jesii Part 2”, while more-or-less a straight-ahead glammy-rocker, manages to pack just enough incoherence into both the vocal exclamations and the instrumentation to make repeated listens seem more revelatory than they really are (not a bad thing).

I should quickly explain something that I’ve stated before (though hopefully not ad nauseum…yet): I love albums. That is to say the artist’s conception of the consumable item as a whole. The sequencing, thematic consistency (or, more frequently, LACK THEREOF), and general recording constraints usually make for some sort of compelling document at least worth a listen (with many exceptions). That said, mine tend to be reviews of ALBUMS.

The second track, “Half Idiot”, acts as a companion to the opener with an insurmountably loathsome protagonist. A very loose bass line snakes around tribal drums with darting, unpredictable vomit guitar for verses that shift into an efficient bang-on-one-chord chorus that builds back into the verse in such a way as to make the rippling carpet of instruments seem even more uncertain, Matt Korvette’s vocals more belabored and thickly slurred. This is a band that knows how to apply maximum pressure with a minimum of bluster, and it makes for quite the aural spectacle. There is little fat on this album: no guitar solos, only one song past the four-and-a-half minute mark, no instrumentals.

The one extended song, “Spent” happens to epitomize the lackadaisical attitude that most of the album features. A slow stalker of a song that measures just about the amount of time it should take to completely destroy every square inch of a small basement studio apartment, then boils over into barely sustained rage halfway through, which carries the album through to its hopeless conclusion several songs later with “Goodbye (Hair)”. The latter features such glowering sentiments as, “if my looks deteriorate, I don’t know what it will do to my self-esteem. Is this what I have to look forward to? I know it will only get worse. If only I had some way to stop it, or at least someone to blame besides myself…”

While “Goodbye (Hair)” manages to drag with the inevitability of old age, “Spent” rails against the ennui of its subject matter. Despite lines like “I earned an extra hundred dollars, there’s nothing I want to buy”, the band’s performance conveys a feeling of (understatedly comic) struggle rather than acceptance. During the plateau to which the whole song builds, the narrator so passionately describes his affliction that he contradicts his own complaint of a passionless existence.

With all of those strong points stated, the major weak point of this album is its sequencing. Side one’s bombastic rockers give way to a second side with considerably less energy. Though the songs are equally strong, it would be a less top-heavy album with just a couple of songs rearranged. I suppose that doesn’t count for much of a strike against it (more of a minor quibble), but ultimately it can make for a less satisfying listening experience on the whole. Both of Pissed Jeans previous full length efforts have benefited from a variety that ultimately lends the closing tracks some sort of greater coherence. Shallow’s closing “Wachovia” has the sort of fried guitar and crumbling drums that manage to embody the album’s tone of all-out unease while hinting at something greater. The same goes for Hope For Men’s “My Bed”, which is half lame psychodrama, and half lame-psychodrama-to-end-all-psychodramas-lame-or-otherwise, which is totally in keeping with the album’s general aura of suburban claustrophobia (although that said, Hope For Men did suffer from unvarying mood to a far greater degree than King of Jeans suffers from the inverse).

That said, “Goodbye (Hair)” is a fine song, it just sums up a different album from King of Jeans, which features its characters giving fewer concessions to the world around them (no defeat à la “I’ve Still Got You (Ice Cream)”, just plenty of woozily lumbering complaint and self-deprecating admissions of shortcomings), and a more heroic delivery than its lyrics suggest. While “Spent” would not necessarily have made a good album closer, it still seems like something with an equal level of pent up rage would be appropriate, leaving the listener feeling less like surrendering, and more like rioting. Music like this should incite audiences to action, and for better reasons than most typically revolutionary music: we were promised flying cars by now, but we can’t even find a cure for acne. When you think of those assholes a hundred or so years from now scooting around in mid-air all carefree and shit, doesn’t it make you feel pretty dissatisfied with the current state of affairs? You smell like shit, look stupid, and hate everyone—even the people you like. And if you don’t feel that way, then you have the sad problem of being in denial so deep it’s practically religion. You poor bastard.