Review Summary: The record most likely to aid in reckless drunk driving.
When the hardcore noise trio Wives broke up in 2005, guitarist Randy Randall and bassist Dean Spunt decided to form the white washed, genre f
uck of a band No Age, while drummer Jeremy Villalobos found his way across the country to Brooklyn and into a slightly heavier outfit. That band, Drunkdriver, has found a reputation as one of the noisiest, most abrasive bands in the contemporary hardcore scene.
Since 2008’s debut LP,
Born Pregnant, they’ve released a cassette single, two seven inches, and an onslaught of a collaboration LP with the electronic artist Mattin. Now, due to controversy that deserves no more media attention than has already been given, it looks as if this eponymous release is the last that we’ll be hearing from this band. Luckily, for new and old fans alike,
Drunkdriver provides listeners with the band’s most palatable production value without surrendering the raw tension of their earlier, more lo-fi recordings.
This record aims to obliterate. Villalobos’s drumming is at it’s finest here, pulsating like an irregular heartbeat verging on chaos; he applies a stark minimalism of uncertainty in his style, never too consistent, but never too absent-minded either. As if through a telepathic understanding, guitarist Kristy Greene follows suit with sets of messy, three chord frenzies that dissolve into toneless destruction. Together they manage to create rhythms and riffs that would sound cluttered with any more layering, but the band’s bare instrumentation plays off of vocalist Michael Berdan’s psychosis perfectly to create a claustrophobic, sickening sensation in the pit of your stomach.
The band has also made great progress in their songwriting capacities. While their aggression and dissonance retains, and may be at its highest potency on this record, they've painted these slaughterings across relatively cohesive song structuring. But don't expect anything too ordinary here, because Drunkdriver is still all about repetition, unexpected changes of pace, and more violent repetition.
The first chord of "Bad Year" is not unfamiliar to the punk record, but in different hands would likely trail off into some repetitive riff. For Drunkdriver, the first chord of "Bad Year"
is that repetitive riff. Get used to it, you'll hear it for almost two minutes. These are the perfect songs for when you're looking to feel (i) uncomfortable, (ii) anxious, (iii) disturbed, (iv) violent, or (v) as a cathartic release of all of these feelings already accumulated.
It's no mystery that 2009 saw a huge fluctuation in bands like Drunkdriver, each churning out the most “mysterious” records hardcore has ever seen (or so they’d like to believe). With Mark McCoy’s Youth Attack label at the forefront of these proceedings, with bands like Salvation, Cult Ritual, and SQRM, amongst countless others on the label, and on countless other labels as well, pushing out seven inches and cassettes and outlandishly ornate lps like they were going out of style (which they are), a band like Drunkdriver loses a bit of their mystery and appeal. It would prove most rewarding for listeners to avoid the rush of the mimicking, homogenous onslaught of “mysterious” hardcore, and to check out
Drunkdriver. There isn’t a record in recent years more horrific, violent, unique, and depraved than this one.
