Review Summary: A testament to its time. A collection of honey-smothered nostalgia.
Between the career-wise disoriented punks with little to no understanding of the world around them, but tonnes of eagerness to express their vaguely communist political beliefs, and murky nihilists with pretend-for-coolness social anxiety syndrome, there is a thin line of Punk musicians that actually cared about anything but statements. They simply wanted to enjoy life and music that made life more colourful for them. Sure enough, this primitive distinction blurred with time. Thankfully.
Imagine some local band of yours. They may not be ground-breaking, but they are decent enough to entertain the crowd. They exist for a couple of years, make a bunch of unsorted material for ***s and giggles and play a handful of live shows. Then they disband and everybody goes their way working as a manager in a pharmacy or something like that. Then, think two or three decades later, someone accidentally stumbles upon those very recordings and decides to release them. And now this band of mates that didn’t even pretend to be anything above a youthful experiment achieves an underground cult status. That’s Come On in a nutshell.
Right from the get-go you are bombarded (well, more like poured on) with twanging guitars, systematically beating drums and yelpy and clearly frustrated vocals. The opener “Mona Lisa” is a catchy tune, in spite of its roughness. The same goes for pretty much the entirety of the album. But don’t think that this is a one-dimensional, one-trick affair. The band sometimes manages to surprise with building, emotional and increasingly more and more crushing songs, such as “Don’t Walk on the Kitchen Floor” and all of its hypnotising glory. It also isn’t always a mild-mannered fun-off. Every now and then it strikes harder, like the aforementioned “Don’t Walk on the Kitchen Floor” or the brutishly snarky “Bad Luck with Parents”. And for every hitting moment, there is also a calmer, cockier noodle, be it the longwinded “Mom and Dad” or made-for-bars “Howard After Six”.
As for the downsides, the fact that this isn’t an album, but a collection of randomly recorded tracks from both studios and live shows on different occasions, set up and arrangement, does strike the ear. The album’s song-to-song flow is only really upheld by the smoothness of the songwriting, because the sound can sometimes jump all over the place. Also, the fact that there was no general idea behind the songs’ unity both adds to the amateurish charm of it all and creates a distraction. Every now and then you’ll be presented with barely finished snippets of songs; or in case of the final track „Untitled”, it’s literally just plain silence for half a minute.
But this album is a beautifully touching throwback to the old days. It’s New York to the core. It’s 70s to the top. It’s Punk in its snappiest and angstiest, without sounding whiny. It’s one of those endeavours that was most likely seen as redundant upon its release (the lacking reception sure does indicate so), but will be appreciated a tonne more today.
