What some people will never understand is that noise is compelling, that noise is a crucial vector for the unpredictability that is necessary to make the hoary ritual of the rock gig vital. Being a shambles does not make you unpredictable – incompetence is the flipside of buttoned-down professionalism, predictably piss-poor, routinely disappointing. Noise overloads your synapses, swamping your brain in a sensory deluge. It carries the risk inherent in introducing sound that can’t wholly be controlled, gambling the certainty of harmony and melody on a flight into the abyss. Noise is half the story with Pissed Jeans – it bleeds from every amplifier, feeding back through every mic and pickup in a coruscurating scree. Even when Dave Rosenstrauss’ bass amp cuts out (as it did for the first two songs) leaving only the Bradley Fry’s guitar and Sean McGuinness’ drums, it sounds like there’s a dozen people playing. When the bass comes back, the sound takes on a belligerent thickness that sinks deep into your innards. On the night, Pissed Jeans favour their slower songs, dragging the lurching, bludgeoning riffs out their instruments like every note pains them. It’s grinding, abject stuff, music to drown out the hell of the outside world. When they erupt into something closer to standard punk speed, you’re blindsided, knocked back by the distortion that’s lashing around like a downed power cable. This is something compelling, something that demands your attention and can’t be readily assimilated or ignored.
The other half of that story is Matt Korvette. Like Iggy Pop, or maybe more relevantly, David Yow, he plays on the revolting plasticity of human flesh, absentmindedly squeezing and folding the slippery flab hanging over the waistband of his jeans. Twisting, kicking out his absurdly long legs, contorting his body around the mic stand, howling his lyrics like a mushmouthed drunk screaming in an alley, he embodies the wrenching discord of the music. The threat implicit in a sweating, half-naked man towering over you as he staggers around the stage draws a wary eye, just as there’s a queasy, uncomfortable fascination in hearing him expose the emotions we usually keep tightly under wraps.
Judging from what others write about them, I’m not alone in seeing in Pissed Jeans the return of something I’ve been missing in rock music for a while. People have drawn a wide range of comparisons, be it to the Birthday Party (I don’t hear it), Flipper (getting warmer) or Black Flag (in “Damaged I” mode, definitely), suggesting that people are hearing what they want to hear, or else that noise offers a wide-open field for interpretation. The name Stickmen With Rayguns shows up like clockwork in every description of them but I suspect that most are cribbing that straight out of the press releases…it’s a name so good you can’t resist dropping it in, but in twenty years I don’t think I’ve even so much as seen it on an actual record. Clearly it’s time to fire up Hype Machine and see if there are any mp3s out there. Pissed Jeans blew me away on Wednesday night, even as they were blatantly struggling with their equipment, even when members of the band were making hurried exits from the stage to puke. The music was a visceral, cathartic blast and I still can’t figure out the reason for the dismally muted response from the admittedly thin audience. But as I say, some people will never understand.
