Fetch The Bolt Cutters Because This Land Is Your Landfill

     The past two Friday's have graced us with two record releases that couldn't have come at a better time.  Fiona Apple's Fetch The Bolt Cutters made a daring escape from her home laboratory and The Homeless Gospel Choir gave us the gift of This Land Is Your Landfill.

     I have had both records in heavy rotation since I jammed them onto my computer.  Vinyl for Fetch The Bolt Cutters is due out in July, at the earliest, and I'm still waiting for my preorder of This Land Is Your Landfill to ship out from A-F Records.  Due to the end times plague shutting everything down, it might be a while before either album is on my turntable.  That is a minor annoyance since I prefer to have liner notes and lyric sheets handy when I make poor attempts at reviewing records.

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     As far as I'm concerned, Fetch The Bolt Cutters might just be the best Punk record of the year. And if, after listening to it, you don't think Fiona Apple put out a Punk record, give it another listen and read up on how it was recorded.  Ms. Apple recorded the album at home, at times using the walls and floorboards as percussion.  From beginning to end, this record is not messing around and has the skill and attitude to back it up.

     Since Fiona Apple operates outside of the tour/record/tour/record cycle, it's been eight years since her last album, The Idler Wheel...  She seems to use that time to be very deliberate in every word and sound chosen to assemble her songs.  At times, the songs butt up against each other rhythmically but still fit together as a whole and more than once I found myself thinking, “I have no idea what just happened but it works for me.”

     Lyrically, I wouldn't say that the knives are drawn so much as the samurai sword has been honed to hair splitting sharpness and aimed in the general direction of the world around us.  Fiona Apple is tearing into society with so much more “Fuck you” in her words than any “Punk” record that I've heard in the past few years.  The debacle that led to a second sexual predator being appointed to the Supreme Court and scumbags such as Louis C.K. were definitely fuel for the songwriting fire.

     My favorite line of the record is “I told you I didn't want to go to this dinner” from “Under The Table.”  It made me recall all of the times an ex would take me to parties and other events that would require me to act like a well adjusted human being so she could show me off to her friends.  Instead of reacting when someone would inevitably say something stupid, I would end up sitting quietly and biting my tongue until it would bleed.

     Fetch The Bolt Cutters is some of Fiona Apple's best work and she keeps getting better from one record to the next.

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     After hearing a handful of the new Homeless Gospel Choir songs live and in person over the past year or so, it was great to finally get to listen to them all together and hear what Derek Zanetti had envisioned with This Land Is Your Landfill.  I knew our collective ears were in for something special but the nicest person in Punk Rock exceeded my expectations with this new record.

     The production was once again aided and abetted by Chris #2 of Anti-Flag.  The dynamic that they have together is incredible.  #2 seems to know how to push Derek to get the best out of him while also knowing when to get out of the way to let Derek be Derek.

     In addition to writing songs about trying to hold it together in the face of mental health issues and having an awareness of the world around him, Derek Zanetti has started taking aim at the internet and social media culture.  And it is odd that being on the internet is how we have to operate now that we're all stuck in quarantine and punk shows are cancelled until who knows when.

     As per usual with every Homeless Gospel Choir record, there is at least one song on This Land Is Your Landfill that calls me on my bullshit.  “Figure It Out” hit me hard.  The song is more or less about the shit sandwich that some of us have to eat when faced with the futility of the Amerikan Dream.

     One of the anonymous internet complaints that This Land Is Your Landfill has been handed is that it's not “Punk” enough.  Maybe the folks that heard the record that way need to broaden the spectrum of what they consider “Punk.”  Or, to paraphrase Bill Hicks, take a look around them and the world in which we live and try shutting the fuck up with their meaningless rules and gatekeeping.  But then again, I am the guy that just wrote that the new Fiona Apple record was punk as fuck.

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     I have had to be careful while listening to both of these records since I'm walking around with a brain injury's worth of trauma and depression while locked in solitude.  I usually have to have a Motorhead or Beastie Boys chaser immediately following to help straighten me out because both Fetch The Bolt Cutters and This Land Is Your Landfill have a lot of weight to them.

Snapcase

     The band Snapcase has been invading my thoughts a lot lately.  They had recently reconvened for a few West Coast shows and a few test pressings of their Steps EP popped up on Discogs (both of which I have given a proper and loving home to.)

     After watching the shaky cellphone videos from these shows, I was sent running to my record shelves and gave the band a listen for the first time in a long time and haven't been able to stop since. I forgot how many layers there were to Snapcase's music.  They were much more than the overindulgent thumping double bass drum sound of their peers.

     The band hailed from Buffalo, NY and due to the proximity to Pittsburgh, Snapcase always seemed to either begin or end a leg of a tour in Pittsburgh because the city was either on the band's way to or from wherever they were going.  This gave me the chance to see the band play so many times that I lost count and I am so grateful to have taken every opportunity to see them that I could.

     I always stood in the back or off to the side with someone in the band that I used to lug gear for at the time and we would stand there slack jawed with envy over how good Snapcase was.  You'd have a hard time finding a tighter band that never seemed to have a bad night.

     Lyrically, Darryl Taberski went deeper than the “I hate my mom/I hate my dad/My girlfriend betrayed me” content of other hardcore bands of that time.  His vocal approach was more of a shout instead of the yelling like a barking dog of other bands.  This way you could actually hear what he was saying and learn a thing or two from what he was putting forth.

     Snapcase always threw a curveball at the meatheads in the pit that rolled up in their gym clothes to perform their version of rugby meets interpretive dance.  They had no idea what to do with their lawnmowers and windmills during the musical ebb and flow of a Snapcase set.

     I will forever be grateful to my friend Dave Hummel for putting a Snapcase CD under my snout when he did.  Progression Through Unlearning was one of the most jarring first listens to a record that I have ever had.  My late adolescent brain was stopped in its tracks and I was incapable of doing anything other than listening to that record all the way through and then doing it again and again.

     The hook that made me an instant fan for life was the song “Harrison Bergeron.”  Not only was it named after my favorite Kurt Vonnegut short story, it's also one of Snapcase's best songs.  If you haven't read the story or heard the song, do yourself a favor and do both.

     Snapcase had one of the strongest album arcs I have ever heard, going from Lookinglasself through their final album End Transmission.  Each record was better than the one before and they continued to build and further push the boundaries of what “hardcore” could be.  I have always been curious to know what direction they would have gone to next if they didn't hang it up in 2005.

     The basketball shorts and hoodies end of the hardcore spectrum left me behind around the same time that Snapcase broke up.  The shows started to feel like they were more about everyone taking pride in hurting each other in the pit than they were about the music.  Without Snapcase around to keep things from getting boring, I stopped going to those types of shows.  The bands all started to sound the same and I really couldn't tell the difference between one band and the next.  The music stopped moving forward and there didn't seem to be a band that was willing to give it a push to keep it from growing stagnant so I gave up on it.

     I really wish I had taken my camera to at least one Snapcase show but I never did.  Since the shows were always ticketed events, I never thought to do so.  Witnessing that band while hiding behind the stage right speaker stack would have been one hell of a way to spend an evening.

The Self-Quarantine Blues?

Addendum:  The below article was all ready to go when I found out that we lost John Prine.  So before we get on to my silly bullshit, here's a John Prine song.  Bill Withers last week and John Prine this week.  Fuck everything.

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     It's a few weeks into this self-quarantine business and I'm starting to realize how little I ever went outside to begin with.  I guess being an antisocial misanthrope who was practically a shut-in to begin with has its benefits during the plague.  It's my time to shine.

     The only real adapting that I've had to do is day jobbing from home.  After twenty years of observing the behavior of my corporate overlords, I'm surprised that even happened.  Their usual approach to a calamity is to tell the help to show our company IDs to any law enforcement we might encounter on our way to the office and try to convince them to let us pass any closed roads or checkpoints.

     The company started out by distributing certificates from Homeland Security for us to show at roadblocks and for us to be able to buy gasoline, if we get to the point where gas stations shut down. The next day, it went to getting a headcount for volunteers to work from home so they could provide laptops.

     The following day it progressed to giving us all twenty-five foot ethernet cables to see if we would be able to run them from our modems to a spot at home where we could set up our computers.  The next morning, management met everyone at the door and told us to unplug our computers, pack up anything else we might need and to go home until further notice.  After two decades of having pens and post-it notes on lockdown, I kept waiting for security to tackle me as I walked through the parking lot with a computer tower and two monitors.

     I have had to make sure that I stick to a similar routine as if I were leaving the house to go to work.  My depression already has me operating at a level that is very much a lame version of Captain Willard at the beginning of Apocalypse Now, laying on the couch staring blankly at the ceiling.  My fear is that if I allow these habits to break down, I'll go full Colonel Kurtz and make my own army of natives out of leftover vinyl mailers and poster tubes.  The horror, the horror.

     Now that I'm working from home and all punk shows have been cancelled for the foreseeable future, I have damn near no reason to go outdoors at all anymore.  Outside of getting the mail in and a weekly Charlton Heston in The Omega Man-like run to the grocery store at 7am on Sunday mornings, I have no real need for the outside world.  I've got plenty of shit tickets and I picked up ten pounds of coffee before Zeke's decided to close so I should be alright for a while.

     After the events of the past few months this has provided me with some much needed downtime that I will gladly take advantage of.  This will give me time away from humanity to find the plot that I have so thoroughly lost without taking it out on people that don't deserve it.  I can't be a miserable prick in someone's general direction if there's no one around.

     The only thing I'm really missing is going to a punk show.  I haven't been to a show since I ventured to New York with Killer Of Sheep.  I was really in the mood for one and they all got called off as soon as I was able to make it to one.  And I do realize the strange paradox between hating to be around people while also wanting to be in a room full of them for a show.  I never said that I wasn't a hypocrite.

     Since my workstation is only a few feet away from the stereo in my living room, I've been giving myself daily listening assignments to fill the silence.  I think by the time this is all over with, I will have worn the needle on my turntable down to a nub.  I pull a stack of records off of the shelves either by artist or by some sort of theme that I cooked up in my head.  I'll keep them spinning until I get to the bottom of the stack.  I'll start at 7am and go well into the evening on some days.

     I have learned that the usual punk rock comfort food records that I used to turn to when times were difficult are not giving me the solace that I used to find in them.  There's something missing when I listen to them now and whatever it is that's gone will hopefully come back at some point.  That crutch of meaningless bullshit that I have always relied on to keep me grounded may have broken.

     But then there are other records that cut into my brain like a knife and I lose all function.  I found that out the hard way with I Used To Be So Young by The Homeless Gospel Choir.  One minute I was fine and the next I was balled up on the couch for the rest of night.

     The one constant on the turntable over the past month or so has been the reissue of Rowland S. Howard's Teenage Snuff Film that Fat Possum put out.  That man had a tone and an attitude from the most depressing pits of Hell and is right up my alley.  Teenage Snuff Film never had a North American release and was always hard to come by at a reasonable price.  The new vinyl mastering sounds lightyears better than the less than legit download that I borrowed off of the internet years ago.

     The one thing that I'm hoping to see in all of this is a battalion of apes riding horses down the middle of what used to be a busy street.  There are already roving gangs of monkeys foraging for food in Thailand so we can't be too far off from Planet Of The Apes.  Humanity has had a less then great run so let's give another species a chance.  A Sci-Fi nerd can hope, can't he?