Poison Idea Pick Your King
1983; Fatal Erection
The thing
that I keep coming back to on this EP is Pig Champion’s guitar tone. Not his
riffs, those are standard issue hardcore to their marrow; fast as hell, not
particularly flashy. The way those riffs sound,
on the other hand, isn’t quite as standard. Rather than a thick, distorted tone
akin to what most other bands of this genre would have dialed in, Pig Champion
opts for something far brighter and cleaner. The combination of that tone and
the riffs is enough to give Pick Your
King as much individual character as any standard issue hardcore album has
ever managed to possess in my opinion. Hardcore isn’t a very varied genre to my
ears, not in that all the bands sound exactly the same so much as they all
follow a distinct enough blueprint that it can feel restrictive to a fault, so
hearing a band using the same general idea but tweaking the sound enough to
prove my conception of the genre as being woefully under-informed is
refreshing.
The thing is
that beyond that tweak to the formula, Pick
Your King is still a standard issue hardcore EP. 13 songs in 13 minutes,
riff after riff after riff with only a few bass-led sections to break it up,
vocals that sound a bit like Henry Rollins’ motor-mouthed younger brother, all
played as fast as the members can handle. There’s not much else to it, and
that’s a small issue for me. All of those qualities I listed above have their
good and bad sides, and other than the small alteration to how one element of
the band sounds relative to its peers none of the good sides are significant enough
to let the contents stand as anything but minor variants on things you’ve heard
before. It’s not a huge issue, but it’s an issue that I can’t exactly ignore
either.
Oddly enough
though, the one time that the band stretches itself far enough beyond that
central sound that it’s immediately noticeable it makes for the worst moment on
the EP. “(I Hate) Reggae” shifts awkwardly between lower-tempo faux-reggae
sections and bursts of their usual brand of hardcore and it’s an obvious
misstep that only serves to highlight just how well things were going up to
then. It’s the only track that doesn’t wind up having a memorable riff too, as
otherwise there’s always at least a flourish that Pig Champion adds to the
songs that makes them easily distinguishable from each other. Take “Pure Hate”
for example, where the guitar simply rides out one repeated chord while the
bass establishes a melody, or the various times throughout the EP that the
guitar abruptly shifts into a descending pattern in line with what little
melodicism there is in the vocal line. These aren’t new and exciting ideas in
hardcore or anything, but they do more than I’d have expected them to in terms
of giving the individual tracks their distinct character.
The bottom
line is that Poison Idea do enough right on their debut that I can’t help but like
them more than I generally find myself liking bands of their genre. The songs
may be short, fast bursts of righteous fury, but they’re also anchored by
playing solid enough to make the minute or so that each track lasts long enough
to showcase some well-developed riffs. The vocals match the intensity beat for
beat, making Jerry A. sound absolutely driven in a way that his most obvious
influence never quite managed. The subjects tackled here are nothing new, and
A.’s take on them is nothing too outside the norm either, but the combination
of the band’s playing and Jerry A.’s delivery of his lyrics – which as you
might expect are compact packages of righteous fury – makes the material feel
vaguely fresh in execution if not in conception. What it winds up boiling down
to is that this EP feels better than its peers even if the contents themselves
don’t seem to add up to anything more. It’s just a feeling but I’m going with
it for now. [5.8]
No comments:
Post a Comment