Review Summary: Chapter IV: Chances are the cat on the album cover is long dead.
Part four of a series of reviews dedicated to the band Jawbreaker in reverse order of the LPs, being the order that I listened to them in.
The punk scene has always been a bit of a joke, if we’re all being honest with ourselves. What started off as young hoodlums picking up stolen instruments and making songs about anarchism, war, and racism has evolved to middle class white kids making sweet melodies to songs about love and parents. Not to say that the original scene is sacred or anything (just listen to how dated The Sex Pistols’ debut is), but it certainly is easy to see how many pop-punk bands end up being the butt of a moderately hip and somewhat funny joke on an elitist website such as this. Then again, how would I know. I wasn’t around in the 70s for The Ramones or The Clash or anything else. What made the band Jawbreaker special was that they knew this. They also knew chances are you weren’t around either.
Jawbreaker took their shameless embrace of personal and emotional topics and spun it on it’s head, making sly stabs at the seriousness of punk rock and at the elitist nature of it all. They made songs about high school-esque crushes (Want) or not being all that tough (Incomplete) while the rest of the scene moaned on about political inconveniences and injustices while never actually voting or changing anything. Jawbreaker didn’t invent pop-punk or emotional music, but it changed the scene. It took the melodic Rites of Spring sound and fused it with Ramones-like song structures and thus created the mold for punk rock in the late 90s and the 00s (for better or worse).
Yeah, that’s great and all, but what about the music? Well, remember that jab I made at the Sex Pistols expense? Yes, admittedly, this album does sound dated in comparison to other Jawbreaker albums, or a lot of other punk albums that came out afterwards, and in some ways that can work in it’s favor. Because of the grainy production and simple song structure, it’s quite easy to appreciate this album retrospectively. Songs such as Seethruskin, Busy, and Gutless are noisier and have more beauteous lyrics than their counterparts in the music scene, but it’s hard to ignore that the song structures are overtly simple. Granted, this can be considered a problem with all of Jawbreaker’s albums, but in later works the band made up for it with even noisier production (Bivouac) or with an epic scope and embrace of a simpler sound (24 Hour Revenge Therapy), only for the problem to come back on Dear You. This album, along with all the other records, is great, but really at this point did you need me to tell you that Jawbreaker can write a beautiful pop song with the hook only containing the droning yet harmonious hook of “I want you”?
Tracks such as Want and Fine Day are perfect punk tracks, and this being Jawbreaker’s debut record, the band doesn’t pull any punches. The bass is loose and funky, the guitars play simple melodies to great effect, and the drums (while not as spastic and fill-heavy as later records) are quick to pick up the pace or slow it down when the song inevitably shifts. The vocals are a lot more throaty and smoky than later on in Jawbreaker’s career, and that’s one of the key components to making Unfun a unique record amongst Jawbreaker’s discography. With every word, you can hear the vocal cords scratching in pain both physical and emotional, and the experience is most certainly, in a word, mesmerizing. From the song Wound the pain is apparent over the blistering punk rock through the naked poetry.
Tried to squeeze my eyes and scrape up my skin.
There's a hole in my head where the bullet went in.
I think it's all in your heart.
And I think it's all in your mind.
You just got to split the difference.
Tell me what it is you find.
Yes, Unfun is quite amateur in many ways for a band with such a cult legacy as Jawbreaker, but that doesn’t make it any less noteworthy. The closest thing I can compare listening to this album is playing the original Half-Life. Yeah, it’s pretty damn dated with it’s once unique non-explicit storytelling and first-person platforming sequences, but noticing these things doesn’t make the experience any worse. It only makes you realize how influential all of it was. And just like Unfun, deep inside this work of art, you can tell that there was a large amount of heart put into every detail of the experience.
But past all of that video game poetry ***, Unfun is an excellent album, and one that shouldn’t be missed simply because it isn’t as unique a listen like the rest of the Jawbreaker discography. It’s emotive, catchy, and influential. I mean, it’s really just a damn good album from a damn good band!
The end.
