Broke Truck, Good Luck

REVIEW FROM LEFT OFF THE DIAL.

With dirt clog laden, banged-up punk rock that makes me feel deja vu for the early days of Jawbreaker and Lookout bands galore, Punk Pie nets a delicious profit of literate musing, simple back-to-basics musical mischief, and boy/girl vocal pingponging. Magnetic tracks like “At The Museum” drop observations of lame, stuffy portrait galleries, swollen Potomacs, and anger towards “structure.” But the writerly musing gets thick and tangy on “Classics,” with its wonderful panorama of “mosquitoes [that] come and wash away another dirty sunset.” Damn, it’s like Cometbus meets Steinbeck, while the music just chops chops through every beat with unruly edginess. On “Wasted,” the gal takes over vocal duties, embarking on a ratty couch litany of boredom, December flu, waiting for rain, and more boredom. Imagine Selby Tigers with an unwavering tilt towards careless disaster music. “Night Eyes” has a part-time rhythmic change-up, but again, forget the gnarled beat and even gnarlier vocals and enmesh yourself in lines like “hills running up your spine,” which outweigh the otherwise tepid lines about driving like a caffeinated freak down a road with white knuckles, sweat stained shirts, etc.

If you thought that the typical Riot Grrl thematic riots of the 1990s were intense, listen to what may be autobiographic brain damage –“Dear Old Dad”– which pays witness to the old man saying weird, cryptic, pseudo-sexual things like “the moon is in your mouth” before falling down and breaking bottles or crying with the daughter in the shed. It’s a picture of familial chaos, a torn Polaroid of time present, and a vicious circle of falling apart and making no sense at all. Still, the way it’s told, in a bombed-out rush of punk rock with candid therapy lines like “I was only eighteen when I fell apart/all my light inside started to get dark,” makes you yearn to get the hell out of that place called home, though home has been permanently burned into your pot-holed cranium, right alongside the DNA. Getting drunk on a jug of wine or six-pack near a ship channel or roof is the best solution the band has to getting off the couch on “Cat’s Luck,” which admits that “burning bridges/only leaves you all alone or dead.” Despite the bleary-eyed, tough season of drinking to relieve, there is intelligence lurking that belies the amateur punch of the music. Even driving to “Madison,” the red diaper baby town famous for lakes and Killdozer, is boring to these jaded rockers, who seem to echo their sense of “going Nowhere” again and again. On “Cold and Clammy,” airport misery is the target of their frustration and wrath, and the boy/girl vocals seem to chase each other’s frantic tails/tales as they “listen for the planes again” and bemoan the sheets dirty “from a month of dead sleep.” She cuts through the hogwash, opining that he’s a boy with too much time and throws “out the paper cuz it’s just the same old news/hot sparks lit the ire beneath these shoes.”

Looking back, for every lame retreat to clichés about being drunk and young, there’s ample evidence of something powerfully shaken, not stirred, in the incisive lyrical lines that glide and even slice through the bullshit, revealing the inner core of young people who can wrestle with language and surprise even the most callow, jaded punks on the planet.