An album you could also conceive it like it was a manifesto. You could eventually also had conceived it like it was a concept album, if the band we are talking about didn’t had the pretese to consider themselves as a true punk rock group and because of this substantially light years far from every possible intellectual approach. But not for this reason you have to consider them like they were ignorant. They’re just what one day you were going to define ‘punk’. In the traditional usage ot the term. Ok? Take it or leave it. How do you have to define on the other hand a band in which Matt Korvette, the frontman of Pissed Jeans, the quartet punk hard-core band formed in Allentown, Pennsylvania (now based in Philadelphia), described the song which anticipated the exit of their last album (‘The Bar Is Low’) just saying it was about how everyone will in the end definitely reveal himself for being as a shit. ‘Why Love Now’, that’s the title of their fifth album out last February 24 via Sub Pop Records, it’s a collection of direct and powerful songs and one of the best disturbing album you’re possibly going to listen to these days not only because of the extreme hard-core buzz sonorities but also because of we are talking about what’s possibly the most provocative band around. That’s a rage against the so-defined modern times. In the sense that Matt Korvette and his mates are apparently fucked up about the lunacy of our society so they take an approach against what they defined as ‘shitheads’ that’s absolutely derisory, even arrugant. Much more than to social and political issues the band concentred themselves on what’re the lacks into the interactions between the people who are part of our society. A discomfort they try to mutate into derision and that they express with a sound that this time it’s apparently not paying homage to what were the bands’ primary influences (Melvins, Jesus lizard…) but much more to the hardcore-punk model of Black Flag both on the sound than on the concepts they tried to develop. By the way, less claustrophobic than the band captained by Greg Ginn, which they on the other hand stealed the typical velocity into the execution of the songs, Pissed Jeans’ sound on this occasion it’s evidently influenced by the production of the iconic punk-wave singer and songwriter Lydia Lunch and of the black metal practitioner Arthur Rizk, who gave a relevant contribution to the band into giving to their sound a major distorced and hard expression. Ecstatic, violent, orgasmic, it’s relevant to consider the fundamental rule of the voice of Korvette, who declared he is right now anymore a punk singer but a true bluesman. His performances are absolutely shocking and contribute to give a sense to this record that could eventually open new perspectives for the band. The opening track, ‘Waiting On My Horrible Warnings’, it’s a true talking blues, domined by an imperious rhythm section (want to mention the Savage Republic as a possible point of reference in this sense) and with the usage of a vibrating synth, a song possessed by the ghost of Howlin’ Wolf and standing at my taste, what created an incredible expectations about the rest of the album. Considering it was possibly the same for the rest of the album. It isn’t so. But I suppose who is into punk and hardcore music would surely be happy because of this and going to listen again and again to the crazy and irriverent songs of this fucking band.
Rating: 5,5/10
