If Why Love Now were a person, you'd cross the road for fear of passing them in the street. Presenting the sleazy and savage side of life with such momentum, Pissed Jeans lay waste to rationalisation and set standards straight.
If you've heard any other Pissed Jeans album then you know what you're in for sonically. The music matches the lyrics blow for blow. The band produce that familiar cesspit of thick masculine riffage and uncompromising grit.
Why Love Now, PJ’s fifth, is a surprisingly tuneful deconstruction of themes as varied as cancer, the modern workplace and male assholery that swings between scary and hilarious.
Why Love Now is a 37 minute horror show which reveals just how terminal their nation has become and their frustration isn’t just palpable, it’s intoxicating and addictive.
There’s nothing orthodox about Why Love Now?‘s sound. But there’s something snidely familiar about its portrayal of modern life. It’s angry, it’s sad and it’s laughably relatable.
This follow-up finds them operating at a similarly scintillating capacity, grinding down on the ugliness buried in the mundanity of modern life and crushing it into the wreckage of metal and post-punk.
It’s that desperate brutality mashed in with a noisy backline that makes Why Love Now feel like hard rock that’s rotting from the inside out.
Why Love Now shows Pissed Jeans' songwriting reaching new peaks of awareness and focus, all the while remaining true to their brand of dissonant punk.
The music is still raw, sludgy, and what Robert Christgau would've called "pigfuck" back in the '80s to describe some of their influences. However, they do change things up a bit.
A funny and noisy commentary on love in the present-day.
It's grim stuff, but it's shot through with just enough dark humor and nervy, pit-worthy energy to propel a proper madcap night out; just don't expect to wake up the next morning.
As a whole, this is a typically unpredictable and manic album. Musically, it couldn’t be accused of being subtle, but it does show a band pushing themselves to see where they can take their sound.
Coupled with a thoroughly nasty and heavy musical backdrop of gnarly guitars, rumbling bass and skull-crushing drums, the end result is an exhilarating, though frequently disturbing, ride through a musical reading of Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream.
Among Pissed's best efforts, it turns an odd corner and becomes one of their gnarliest, ugliest, hulking sets of pulverizing tracks. The humor isn't gone but it stings more. Worldwide Marine Asset Financial Analyst, Cold Cold Whip Cream, Waiting on My Horrible Warning and Have You Ever Been Furniture should be classics in time. Just because the album is, at times, slower, it doesn't mean Pissed Jeans are stopping. Instead, it's an opportunity to wade in the filth.
This amount of humor and abrasiveness shouldn't work so well together, but it absolutely does.
Favorite tracks : COLD WHIP CREAM, I'M A MAN, IT'S YOUR KNEES, ACTIVIA and NOT EVEN MARRIED.
1 | Waiting On My Horrible Warning 4:16 | |
2 | The Bar Is Low 3:15 | 25 |
3 | Ignorecam 2:58 | |
4 | Cold Whip Cream 2:36 | |
5 | Love Without Emotion 4:00 | |
6 | I'm A Man 2:39 | |
7 | (Won't Tell You) My Sign 2:43 | |
8 | It's Your Knees 3:33 | |
9 | Worldwide Marine Asset Financial Analyst 1:26 | |
10 | Have You Ever Been Furniture 2:38 | |
11 | Activia 4:27 | |
12 | Not Even Married 2:35 |
#24 | / | Louder Than War |