Off! – s/t 7” EP (Vice)
Off! is Keith Morris’ new band. Or rather, it’s a super-group with Keith Morris in the vocalist slot. Drummer Mario Rubalcaba is late of Hot Snakes (and currently plays in Earthless), bassist Steven McDonald is the Steven McDonald of Red Kross fame, and Dimitri Coats, he of The Burning Brides and perpetual behind-the-scenes hustling about. This 7” is one of four that make up an entire album, on Vice no less, who had probably hoped or contracted for a Circle Jerks record, though what they got might be better than that. How they got it is quite bizarre. Not as bizarre as that genuinely insane blip in the mid ‘90s in which Debbie Gibson joined Morris for a duet of The Soft Boys’ “I Wanna Destroy You” on the band’s sole major label effort in 1995. Of course, that record (the last proper Circle Jerks studio album) appeared on Mercury, the major whose navigation of the post-Nirvana feeding frenzy was almost as entertaining to watch as Chrysalis Records support inaugural crap-shoot Butt Trumpet during the same period.
Nor is this record, or the genesis of it, as bizarre as Keith Morris working as an A&R rep for V2 (work’s work, dawg) until said (major) label shut down about six years before the entire industry shit its trousers. Tons of money in A&R rep work these days. That was a joke. What’s no joke is that the rest of the Circle Jerks walked out on Morris, or vice versa (doesn’t really matter), when album producer Coats started rejecting CJ content. But Morris went in Coats’ corner, they wrote a song a day until they had this record, and the damned thing isn’t half bad. That’s coming from someone who’s heard a fourth of it, so throw that in the equation, too. It does not sound like Burning Brides fronted by Morris, nor does it sound like Hot Snakes fronted by Morris. The former might be a possibility, the latter would not, as only rare instances have surfaced in which a drummer has trademarked a band’s entire sound (Turing Machine, Don Cab/The Speaking Canaries). Redd Kross? You have one guess. But the Circle Jerks? Does this sound like the Circle Jerks? Well, it doesn’t resemble what most thinkers would assume a Circle Jerks record would sound like in 2010, which likely hovers between “hot garbage” and “surgically base”… no, this is better than all that. That said, it’s not great or especially good, yet it is passable and perhaps superior to the bulk of the Fat Wreckords roster. This assertion is not saying much due to the lack of much to say re: these four songs. Uptempo but not blurring. Melodic but not catchy. And lyrically? I regret to pass along that what I can make out on “Black Thoughts”, “Darkness”, “I Don’t Belong”, and “Upside Down” hardly ventures much further than what those titles would imply.
Even from day one, the Circle Jerks were a crystal ball showing how pedestrian hardcore would go bad four or five years down the road. They were also that half of the genre I like to call “afterthought hardcore” … nonsense (potty humor, socio-politico-light musings, violence, fuck-up behavior) overshadowed the music because the music was easy to overshadow. Morris didn’t cut it in Black Flag because of the practice mentality, it has been reported, but Ginn and co. were upper-echelon thinkers posing as everymen, and Morris has always been an everyman posing as a teenager. That’s not the slight that it might appear to be; Morris is likeable, and that means something. It also means something that he’s pushing 60 and can pull off this performance, especially with adult-onset diabetes lurking in his system. His voice is in perfect form here, and so are his dreadlocks, it must be stated. Jesus, that shit is off the chain; he could be hiding the cure for diabetes in those things, or the Shroud of Turin. Or both. David Allan Coe, move over. As for this 7”? A whelming curio? That’s it. (http://www.viceland.com/vicerecords)
(Andrew Earles)
