Track Five – Halloween Night
I’m not saying that punk rockers ought to live in a sewer while handwriting revolutionary pamphlets. That’s the kind of fantasy that John Lydon might want to share with the world, but one that even he, a nicely-dressed and well-spoken man, has cared to test out for too long. But let’s not pretend that it’s okay for punk-rockers to be liked by everyone! Let’s not make it okay for punk to be a thing that anyone can turn on and off! This ain’t just a musical flavour.
Track Five is one of the bands that, in their hopes, are keeping the hope alive by being the kinds of people that you’d never want to invite over for Sunday dinner. But there are plenty of famous punk-rockers who could drive by. We’ve got punks on reality television shows, selling NFTs, and playing sped-up pop songs for a living. None of those things is a crime, but they are pretty lame.
Getting hammered and trying to snap yourself out of depression, all while being a nuisance to everyone around you, except your dearest friends, on the other hand, is not lame, but a strategy for survival. Track Five still specialises in melodic pop punk for “Halloween Night,” but there’s some noticeable grit and a bit of welcomed hostility that the group brings to the mix, and that helps the band be lovable precisely because they don’t care about being hated.
Crushing – discipline
Life gets messy! Rooms get smelly! People start yelling and get photographed in all kinds of compromising situations! The truth ain’t pretty, but most art forms won’t touch it. What would they do with it if they could manage to get their hands on its quivering content? They’d try to wash it up, dry it, and make it seem to be something better or more important than it really was.
That’s why rock n’ roll has often turned out to be so exciting. People in bands are known as having just crawled out of the swamp, and their songs contain the stories that other artists are simply not interested in.
Crushing is a band whose music sounds like it was informed by fresh, bizarre, new experiences. And don’t we need more of those? If we don’t make room for those, on the other hand, you’re going to end up solely with old rockers trying to recall how big the mess was, or how bad the smell got, and never really managing to come up with sufficient details.
Crushing’s “discipline” feels like the first punk-rock written by someone who’s first been forced to endure a night out in a big city. There’s innocence there, sure, but it’s eroding. You can hear it in the neat chords and nicely sung parts that, slowly, turn into choppy guitar parts and screamed vocals. It’s marvellous to have a sonic document of that, and an exciting testimony from the front lines to people who’d rather make their minds up by reading the news.
