
The Free Life – Godzilla
Kids grow up wanting to astronauts, pro football players, Jimmy Page, or at least a member of the Sex Pistols. Not many grow wanting to one day develop a group like the Dead Milkmen and, frankly, we are all the worst for it.
It’s hard to tell whether professional agitators dreamed up such a group on purpose, or whether they just couldn’t be bothered to record music that portrays them in any other light than a natural one.
Godzilla is a great, quirky punk-rock tune composed, essentially, as a long speech on the dangers of nuclear radiation. The Free Life’s punk rock spirit lies in subverting expectations about what a rock song or a song at all for that matter should be. They’re not tough guys, nor do they have the patience to pretend otherwise. And, this is what makes them enjoyable. Like the Dead Milkmen, they sound like the kind of music you may have wanted to make when you were four years old but didn’t have the minimal playing ability to do so.
Call in Dead – Minor Threat
There’s a reason that unlike, say, some of the 90s grunge-rock songs, no early-hardcore tunes get covered for commercials and Broadway shows. For most of the time, it’s one of those “you just had to be there to understand” scenarios. Early-hardcore groups were idealists detonating bombs of noise and fast tempos.
However, if there’s one group that has aged well in both terms of sound and, especially, their vision it’s Minor Threat. The legendary punk group led by Ian MacKaye, not his first or last to achieve this kind of status, put out the single Minor Threat in 1980 as a kind of letter of intent and incrimination of society’s desire to rush the youth through the stages of their life and into the workforce.
Call in Dead is a quartet sharing similar idealistic values and long verse in the punk scene. Their songs revel in what the original U.S. groups did best, fast, short, catchy songs. It only makes sense that they would give a nod to their forebears, excellently covering Minor Threat, and, hopefully, enticing you to hear more of their work.
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