Saturday, November 8, 2014

I Used To Look Like Sean Penn But Then I Grew Up

You probably haven't been around long enough to know this (I realize not everyone's as old as Tim Hinely), but when bands like Killdozer and Drunks With Guns first started coming out, a few writers took the obvious angle that they were "anti-hardcore bands": like, thrash was supposed to be fast, and these bands were seemingly playing as slow as possible, so they must be trying to sound like the opposite of hardcore, right? I'm not sure if that was really the case (I'm also not sure that Byron Coley actually liked Lost Generation, either, but the review he wrote sure seemed like it), but if Killdozer sounded like anything early-on it was probably like a good American knock-off of the Birthday Party. Although hardcores like myself didn't know it at the time, I mean, who knew about the Birthday Party back then, other than they were some band that Tim Yohannan made fun of once (fuck MRR, too). To me, they just sounded like some cool Wisconsin rock band, contemporaries of Die Kreuzen and Couch Flambeau and Mecht Mensch and so forth. Sounds like a pretty good scene to me. Then Killdozer got older and everyone started liking their Neil Diamond and Black Oak covers, so they started putting one those on every record, which got old really quick and so they descended into some sort of novelty act, like Shel Silverstein does Flipper, or something. This single ("The Pig Was Cool") came out long after they kicked one of the brothers out, which kinda sucked. I've never bothered to listen to the EMF cover on the flipside and I'm not about to start now.



Killdozer -

"The Pig Was Cool"




4 comments:

gsdgsd13 said...

I put that "Unbelievable" cover on a lot of mix tapes for girls in college. I also didn't get married until I was 39, so draw your own conclusions.

Brushback said...

Sounds like you had the right plan

ib said...

I used to look vaguely like Marlon Brando, but then someone plumbed in the bicycle pump...

Brushback said...

Seems plausible...