FUEL - MONUMENTS TO EXCESS
It wasn't like I used to hate pop punk, per se. I was just ambivalent about it for the most part. With the arrogance of the 16 year old who told all the kids who discovered Tool when stinkfist made it into the triple j hottest 100 that year to 'listen to Quicksand man, they totally did it first', I considered it immature or something fucking re re like that. Starter music, before you got into the more sophisticated 'hardcore' and 'emo' indie rock stuff I was reading about in well thumbed copies of status, nothing left and second nature, and listening to over and over again on tapes warped by the shitty rewinding function on my two dollar shop walkman.
And bands I used to go see and fucking love, like that one brief shining period where Bodyjar had like four good songs, and Caustic Soda, and the almighty One Inch Punch? Fuck off, they were something better. In my outer eastern suburban arrogance and ignorance I was the only one (well certainly the only one in my high school, that I knew of or cared about anyway) that knew about them. They were mine, secret, and therefore much more credible.
Then I heard the MXPX song 'chick magnet' and my condescending ambivalence about pop punk turned to utter, furious hatred. What the fuck WAS this bullshit? Some stupid walking bass part that's one of the first things you learn in the cheesy bass lines to piss off yr parents 101 book, and a horrible guitar sound and the guy could actually sing?! What a bunch of shit! And suddenly the people who beat me up with metal fence stakes for displaying such obvious signs of homosexuality as 'not liking football' and 'not drinking' were into this music?!! And it was all down hill from there. Bands like The Ataris, Saves The Day and New Found Glory make me want to vomit in rage. (Sorry Cam, but they do). I'm sure there's a lot to appeal to people who're into it but there's nothing punk rock about it to me. It's all so fucking clean, and produced, and fucking boring. It was (and is although I don't really care about it anymore) the antithesis of punk rock to me. Punk was about avoiding being slick and eaily digestible. If you were going to write pop songs, I reasoned, you could do them all lo fi and cool. If you were going to play fast upbeat shit, you could do it like Lifetime and cool. Fuck this clean, pretty, striving to be pure, often chrisso stuff. I was on some next level Winston Smith shit dude; I HATED purity and prettyness in music. Punk was the life-saving refuge for social outcasts and this crap seemed to associated with everything that was boring and conservative and therefore oppressive and alienating.
Fast forward a couple of years and not much has changed. Hell in 2008, right now, not much has changed. I don't actively wish for bands like that's deaths anymore but I do dismiss them as utterly irrelevant to what I'm doing and/or music for people that would've beat me up in highschool. And If you like that music, I'm totally not dissing you or yr taste or saying you can't be into this stuff and the ebullition back catalogue as well. 26 is far too old to be 'judging' people based on what music is important to them or saying their experiences aren't just as valid for them as mine are for me. I'm just detailing my own complicated relationship with the music that's a disturbingly large part of my life. For better or worse I was totally all about aesthetics.
To some degree I still am but Fuel's monuments to excess was part of the step in turning me around. This record is pop punk as all fuck. Seriously, holy shit. Fuel was one of my more later experiences of the genius of Mike Kirsch. I got into Bread and Circuits, whom seriously changed my life, then Navio Forge, then Torches to Rome, then Fuel. I'd always read about them as the band that all the older kids said Hot Water Music was ripping off. Hot Water Music's forever and counting was the soundtrack to the years 18/19 for me, as not only was I dealing with all the being an adult shit but coming to realise that something seriously wasn't right in my head. I got a HWM fire/water thing as my first and so far only tattoo. A band that inspired (though they deny it) them? Fuck yeah, sign me up!
Fuel - whom if you were wondering, aren't the band post-grunge radio rawk band that produced that song shimmer or any of that crap - were a bay area punk rock band in the early 90s, apparently inspired by Fugazi/DC but coming from the same scene that produced Green Day, Crimpshrine and Aaron Cometbus, and distinctly filtered with that kind of vibe. So when I first put this record on and listened to the palm muted guitar chords of disengaged I was like 'okaaay...this is cool. Wait what the hell is up with these vocals?! Oh man this is...well they're yelling sort of out of tune and shit and that's cool but this is way less 'emo' than I expected'. Next song, 2:52 (instrumental), a, just that, instrumental. 'Oh god listen to those guitar leads, this song is so happy! I mean it's kinda wonderfully amateurish in the way it sort of goes out of time and stuff but shit...I can imagine people doing mad pop punk jumps to this!'. I was conflicted.
Fuel - whom if you were wondering, aren't the band post-grunge radio rawk band that produced that song shimmer or any of that crap - were a bay area punk rock band in the early 90s, apparently inspired by Fugazi/DC but coming from the same scene that produced Green Day, Crimpshrine and Aaron Cometbus, and distinctly filtered with that kind of vibe. So when I first put this record on and listened to the palm muted guitar chords of disengaged I was like 'okaaay...this is cool. Wait what the hell is up with these vocals?! Oh man this is...well they're yelling sort of out of tune and shit and that's cool but this is way less 'emo' than I expected'. Next song, 2:52 (instrumental), a, just that, instrumental. 'Oh god listen to those guitar leads, this song is so happy! I mean it's kinda wonderfully amateurish in the way it sort of goes out of time and stuff but shit...I can imagine people doing mad pop punk jumps to this!'. I was conflicted.
By the last song on the first side, cue to you, was perhaps more what I expected. Pop punk still, but in the way that trying to write songs to sound like first two eps Fugazi always ends up sounding like pop punk. And that cool two note harmonic lead thing? That rules. Vintage Kirsch. Wait, what's going on here? Change in the middle of the song? OH SHIT! The song burst into an amazing fast part, complete with out of tune backing vocals and raging lead and holy shit I'm literally up off my chair in shock. That was, to that date, one of the coolest things I'd ever heard in a song. This was worth flipping the LP and catching the second side. First song on side B? The name is.
One of the things I've hated - since I went from stupid kid who didn't care to jerk who alienated all his highschool friends with his politics to whoever I am now - and don't think I'll ever come to accept from people is people saying (unironically, or without the 'it's either laugh at it or I'll cry' un-pcness of most 'pc' people) 'gay' to mean shit's bad, or calling someone a homo or whatever. I just fucking hate it, even if you say 'ghey', or go like 'but it used to mean 'happy', the meaning's just changed again'. It's like, no, that's not the fucking point, the meaning has changed because 'gay' is socially constructed as bad; and so therefore the meaning still comes from hate. I tried to articulate that in songs so many times and it never came out. And then I'm listening to this song called the name is about racist or homophobic jokes, asking "where do you find the humor in that? I've got a name for that. The name is 'hatred'", and suddenly this record fucking made sense. Not only did it do that but it gripped me by the heart and gut and mind the way other later Kirsch bands already had and made me think, and feel so amazed and so fucking empowered and energised by music that was fucking saying something that I identified with. And I was getting those feelings, that shortness of breath and 'holy shit I could stay up all night listening to this' excitement from a band that was fucking pop punk?
And that's the moment I realised my stupid attitude had probably cut me off from some incredible music that was just as powerful, innovative and moving as my the musical palette that I thought was more 'grown up'.
The thing I love about a lot of good hardcore punk music, particularly in the 90s but just in general, is really how amateurish it is. Listen to why can't you see. They're fucking rapping in that song dude! But fuck in 1990 in that scene if you had this kinda white boy funk meets Fugazi thing going on in a song and a lot of words to say, why the fuck not do it? Rap meeting guitar music and honkys hadn't turned into stupid faces and MiZPeLLed BaNd NAymez yet so there was no warning sign on that road. And if the thing you were trying to say was so simple, if yr politics were charmingly naieve and all like 'look, I mean, come on, this is just plain common sense, be nice to each other people' well what the fuck is wrong with that?
I've always loved bands - ie Milemarker - where I can see the aesthetic, the thing that they're going for, so fucking clearly that I don't care if they don't quite get there and honestly they suck a little bit (ie Milemarker). Fuel is kinda like that for me. It's not 'sophisticated' and it doesn't fucking have to be. If you wear yr heart on yr sleeve genuinely, then outside of that moment you are going to come across as very dorky. But if you're true about it, you don't care. This record is fucking dorky and so fucking cool. When HWM came along a few years later building on the two guitars / two vocals and a simple positive message punk rock thing, I can now see why they had the impact they did. It was like the promise of bands like Fuel and the things they hinted at coming together just that bit more. And every time I feel really bummed out on music great 'honest', whatever that means, bands like this make me realise that it is truly the greatest thing that I've been able to experience.
I actually sold my LP copy of this earlier this year. At the time I didn't have a working record player, and instead had a massive bass amp repair bill to try and cover. And for some reason (probably the no turntable amp bit) I was going through this phase of getting everything I had on vinyl on CD. I mean I mostly listened to music in the car anyway, right? DUMB. But as soon as I got my cash for the LP, I walked over to the second hand CD section and got the copy of the Fuel discography CD (on broken rekkids and I think out of print) that was sitting in there. I wasn't going to walk out of that store leaving that LP without taking those songs home in another format.
Hype it up much? Don't care, it's late and I'm a little blazed. And I've listened to this record three times in a row, and I know when I go to bed I'll feel all lonely and shitty like I always do, and when I get up and go to work tomorrow I'll feel fucking stressed about all the files on my desk and the uni papers waiting for me back here at home. But I'll always have records like 'monuments to excess' to put on and just go 'fuck yeah...dude...fuck yeah...'.
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=f0af379cc9071c94ab1eab3e9fa335ca68550b2a285fa1aa
http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=f0af379cc9071c94ab1eab3e9fa335ca68550b2a285fa1aa
Fuel - 'monuments to excess', ebullition no. 23 (originally released as s/t on cargo), 1990.
SIDE A - disengage / 2:52 / some gods / remains to be seen / cue to you
SIDE B - name is / why can't you see / actualized / habit / not up for sale
