Pissed Jeans – Half Divorced LP

Description

*Loser Edition on Spotify Green Vinyl

Pissed Jeans has never been a band that goes halfwaytheyre known for their feral vocals, biting lyrics, buzzsaw guitars, and unhinged live shows, and their sixth album, Half-Divorced is no exception. These songs skewer the tension between youthful optimism and the sobering realities of adulthood, and when viewed through frontman Matt Korvettes scowl, everything takes on a level of violent absurdity.

Pissed Jeans notorious acerbic sense of humor remains sharper than ever as they dismember some of the joys that contemporary adult life has to offer, from helicopter parents to stolen catalytic converters to being $62,000 in debt. On Seatbelt Alarm Silencer, Korvette growls, Call it a death drive but that aint fair / Drive implies Im headed somewhere.

So where does a band like Pissed Jeans go after nearly twenty years of making music, after becoming fathers, after marriages, and after divorces? Existence has festered to a boiling point. Korvette said, Half-Divorced has an aggression within it, in terms of saying, I dont want this reality. Theres a power in being able to say, I realize you want me to pay attention to these things, but Im telling you that they dont matter. Im already looking elsewhere.

Even within the brutality that Korvette conjures on songs like Killing All the Wrong People (If violence is now their form of play / Lets aim em towards those who made em that way), the energy on some of these songs is inadvertently, well, fun. Listening to this album will give even the most jaded nine-to-fiver the sense that unrestrained freedom is still possible. And who else is going to rhyme colonizer with moisturizer anyway?

Korvette, Brad Fry (guitar), Randy Huth (bass) and Sean McGuinness (drums) werent in any rush to finish Half-Divorced, which was recorded by Don Godwin at Tonal Park in Takoma Park, Maryland. Were not the kind of band that bangs out a new record every two years, Korvette said. Pissed Jeans is truly like an art project for us, which is what makes it so fun. This lack of restraint rages within the songs that unexpectedly veer into classic hardcore punk territoryoften coming in at under two minutes long and erupting like the butane tank explosion Korvette sings about in Junktime.

This distilled energy makes Half-Divorced sound menacing and dangerous. Korvette said, We realized wed never really fucked with pop punk, and we thought, this is something that isnt going to be immediately recognizable as cool. So lets challenge ourselves to make it feel cool to us.

Theres also a Pink Lincolns cover, Monsters, on which Korvette sings, People are more hideous than monsters. And in the last song, Moving On, Korvette sneers, Cheesing into my cameraphone / Pretending that Im not alone / Lifes the first thing that we all postpone. One gets the sense that Pissed Jeans refuses to postpone life in quite the same waylife, like art, is something that happens now, not later.

The word divorce falls in line with the moments of humiliation and shame that are held up for all to see on this album. Korvette said, If you say something enough or if you just allow it to exist publicly, then it loses its evil monster-in-the-closet thing. There is clarity to be found within both the light and the dark, in both the marriage and the divorce. As the chorus of the last song calls out: Im moving on, Im moving on, Im moving on.