Review Summary: "I know you might be searching for some meaning on this earth/Don't be stabbing nature in the back by giving into birth"
Playing shows on the vert ramp at the base of their squatter bulding, and of the lowliest area of life thought imaginable by Americans,
Leftover Crack shared with one another a point of view that made their music into a counterpoint in itself. It was an interesting enough combination - hardcore/ska, and it gave Leftover Crack their signature style. The angry, rash, hollering punk resolved by the soothing ska made the band into a group of true musicians, real people - unlike generic hardcore, or generic ska. Now in their most recent, and finely crafted release
*** World Trade, Leftover Crack grew away from their grinding sound, and put out something extremely musical. Inclined to inspire and move the listener, and make one think and believe, like great punk music should do. Which is a nice break, because punk doesn't do much for the public anymore. Punk is done, it's dead. It all had it's time and come to an end it has. The music was all initially a revolt against things like conservatism, greed, hunger, imprisonment, brutality, and the police. That area of songwriting is up and clear in the eye of the musician nowadays. And that's why it's all trashed, because
everybody accepts it as something 'classic', and it's actually become a worthless mindset of modern mainstream 'leftist' mother***ers. Anarchy is a stupid ideal, and chaos leads to nothing
close to reform, rather the destruction of all parties. Leftover Crack's mode of punk is much more down to earth, and realistic, than say, 'Anti-Flag' or 'The Casualties', a couple target poster-boys for recent 'punk' music. On
*** World Trade, stza's lyrics are the message written in the concrete that is the instrumental side of the record. It's not a two part thing, they are molded together quite well. Leftover Crack create, from 'Clear Channel (*** Off)' to the massive closer 'Operation: M.O.V.E.' a politically drug-addicted rebellious form of gloom and realization, something that could come from the mouths and hands of nobody but brutally abused, utterly misshappen squatters with 'lackluster lives' being the grandest of understatements for them.
I think of the gloom and the realization going hand in hand in all of the songs. Stza's input to the record are without a doubt necessary for the whole thing to ride through correctly, but the interesting connection to be made is the pure ability of the raw instrumental side of
*** World Trade. Like the better side of post-rock, the music without the lyrics and the vocals, all of that alone can indeed express the intended emotion and meaning all by itself. For example, the cool, swaying 'Soon We'll Be Dead', the tempo and instrument changes in 'Life is Pain', the three parts of 'Operation: M.O.V.E.', which in themselves can be thought to be all instrumental, if you count stza's monstrous screaming as nothing remotely humane. As stated, this is a very solid, concrete, written album, and the parting of one of anything could push it into ruin. This was not created at all in some random punk jam. As for the vocals, it's everything you heard from stza on
Mediocre Generica, and then some more as well. For most of the record he's singing with that pushy punkish yell, with the occasional scream here and there - but the lyrics on this album make it into so much more. That's one of the reasons *** World Trade can be thought of as the band's finest work: is stza's punk lyrical mastery. If you read into them, you'll find the angriest of souls in the stza. Upset about most everything he's experienced, and seen, and read about, he writes with feeling - he makes
real songs. Nothing makeshift, no forty-second screaming stints, no stiff arrangements. The stza is one of punk's greatest songwriters, because every one of the song's Leftover Crack writes is backed by the emotion behind that, behind this, fronting that, killing off this. There's no dilly-dallying on *** World Trade.
FWT is the essence of raw emotion, because that's all the band had. Their was no intricate mixing, and they didn't have modern production at it's finest in any way shape or form. They were homeless crackheads, what would they afford? I was personally surprised to actually hear violins. It is a record of catastrophe, and easiness, and pain. Every song on the album is an above average punk song, and then every song on the album is real. Leftover Crack were a representation of what punk is and should be, and the ways things have changed, and how the current epoch of disaster is growing into nothing aside from just that. That is all that can be said about Leftover Crack and their 2004 release
*** World Trade, because if there were more to say, they'd have put another song on the album to say it.
