Introduction
Five Songs, 12/11/2020
Five Songs

Five Songs, 12/11/2020

.
.
.
They Might Be Giants, "Put Your Hand Inside The Puppet Head"

While the first TMBG album certainly sounds primitive compared to where they'd end up, there are still plenty of their hallmarks present even with this early song. They were capable of writing catchy tunes from the beginning, they had the clever lyrics, and the charm was certianly present. The first album has too many incidents of wackiness, too many throwaways to be really great, but there are some fine tunes on it.

The Evens, "Cut From The Cloth"

The Evens are married duo Amy Farina and Ian MacKaye, on drums and baritone guitar respectively. While there isn't the same punk fury as Fugazi, the songs are still excellent, and it's fun hearing MacKaye in particular in a new context. The second Evens album, Get Evens, is an even more spare album than the first album, with essentially no instrumentation outside of guitar and drums. This only works when the songs are strong, and they very much are here.

Kustomized, "It Lives!"

Fuck yeah garage rock!

NoFX, "Together On The Sand"

The "short acoustic number" was very much a staple of early 90s punk rock albums. They're invariably perfectly pleasant throwaways, even if there's often a fair bit of a smirk there.

8-Bark, "Breathe"

Forgotten punk band out of Chicago, 8-Bark was distinguished by having both male and female vocalists in the band. It's good, energetic stuff, the sort of thing you can exhume from all across the burial grounds of punk rock.

Joshua Buergel
View Comments
Next Post

Five Songs, 12/12/2020

Previous Post

Five Songs, 12/10/2020