There was once a time when each and every mundane indignity of grownup lifestyles had a corresponding Seinfeld episode. Now the ones indignities encourage grimly humorous Pissed Denims songs. Demoralized about our dehumanizing healthcare business? There’s a Pissed Denims tune for that. Depressed about going bald in early maturity? There’s a Pissed Denims tune ranting about that. Fantasizing about your blowhard venture supervisor’s dying? Those freaks have a tune for you, too.
Twenty years into their profession, the Pennsylvania-bred punks are the poets laureate of pathetic males flailing in opposition to their very own obsolescence. (That’s a praise—to painting a personality isn’t to worry your self with the nature’s likability.) On Part Divorced, their first album in seven years, Pissed Denims haven’t overhauled their sound or reinvented themselves or “matured” as artists such a lot as they’ve accrued a brand new stock of recent miseries to change into scuzz-punk tantrums, from catalytic converter robbery (“[Stolen] Catalytic Converter”) to crippling clinical debt (“Sixty-Two Thousand Bucks in Debt”).
Let different bands deal with the political and structural reasons 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 tremendous shape on “Helicopter Mother or father,” yowling in regards to the micromanaging inclinations of bougie folks (“Why ya respiring down the again in their neck!?”) over a sludge-metal riff that oozes like overflowing sewage. It can be the funniest tune about parenting since Randy Newman’s “Love Tale (You and Me).” The band additional indulges its comedic facet on “All over Is Unhealthy,” an amusingly explicit travelogue of ills. The playful call-and-response section—enumerating other towns and the explanations they suck (“Philadelphia/Trashy streets/San Francisco/There’s not more freaks!”)—conjures up the humor-infused punk of the Useless Milkmen greater than any hardcore reference issues.
If Part Divorced has a declare at being Pissed Denims’ funniest album, it’s no longer their maximum musically stimulating. “Helicopter Mother or father” and “Junktime,” a half-spoken yarn about poisonous waste fallout, are exceptions—sludgy, slow-burning eruptions that exhibit the band’s ability for pressure and unlock, goaded through Korvette’s throat-scraping anti-charisma. The remainder of the report performs it rather directly, with fast and grimy hardcore outbursts like “Killing The entire Improper Other folks” and “Alive With Hate” that summon a lot of bludgeoning power however little in the way in which of memorable riffs or refrains.
