Review Summary: ice creeeeeeam
Pissed Jeans don’t give a damn about you, or your pathetic needs for melodic music and pleasant sounds, for structure, and they certainly don’t give a damn for your ears for that matter. Pissed Jeans are a band that force you to adapt to their idiosyncratic style of music, which is hardcore stripped to its rawest and most basic form. The unassuming listener would find
Hope For Men staples such as “A Bad Wind” and “Fantasy World” almost too simple and stripped-back; or they’d just find a dude screaming about pizza and ice cream over a sh
it-ton of noise too ridiculous for their high-and-mighty tastes. They’d just find it too simple, too brain-dead, too
stupid.
Hope For Men is simultaneously just that (stupid) and more than that at the same time. Sure, it’s pretty simple-- most songs feature Bradley Fry and Randy Huth just making a ton of noise on their respective instruments while Matt Korvette sings incoherently overhead-- but it’s so awesome that this simplicity’s excusable. It’s near impossible to find anything wrong with songs like “I’m Turning Now” and “Caught Licking Leather”, where Fry crunches out Jesus Lizard-esque riffs and feedback while Korvette “sings” incomprehensible lyrics, sounding like Iggy Pop with mouth cancer and a sore throat. “I’ve Still Got You (Ice Cream)” is also a highlight, sounding like Nirvana meeting Melvins meeting crazy-as
s acid, and so is “A Bad Wind”, which is a raucous bruiser that features Pissed Jeans at their most accessible, as you can just discern some sort of skewed melody underneath all the noise and simpleton riffage. These songs are just too damn fun, in their noise rock/hardcore punk/ear-bleeding sort of way, and
Hope For Men is thankfully composed of nothing but songs of these sorts. This sound never gets old and, throughout its 40-or-so-minute runtime, neither does
Hope For Men; weirdly arty and rather funny spoken word tidbits, such as the feedback-ravaged “The Jogger”, help diversify the album. "My Bed" also helps diversify
Hope For Men, being a down-and-dirty stoner doom piece that stretches past seven minutes, and recalls recent Harvey Milk material at its rawest. It’s the best track on the album-- it’s a brutal piece, one that’s oddly expansive yet never meandering-- and a fine way to close the album.
Pissed Jeans are the best type of band-- one that doesn’t take themselves too seriously, one that seems like a bunch of guys that anyone would want to hang out with, one that makes relatable songs about ice cream, etc-- and
Hope For Men perfectly captures this likeability. Sure, it sounds ridiculous, and lyrics like “auggggghhh/I still got you/ice cream”, but they’re funny and relatable (who doesn’t like ice cream), and sounds like the sort of stuff a bunch of drunk/stoned high school students (like myself) would create in their garage, and have a hell of a lot of fun making it. For now, we’ll just have fun listening to it.
