By Rem Jensen
The scope of punk in the state of the grass-prowling flagged bear has birthed some of the most influential and quality groups in the genre far removed from the roots of NYC’s Ramones and Detroit’s Death. The alumni of California’s scrungy sewer-tinged alma mater spawned those beginnings in X, the title matchees of Black Flag and Minutemen, the deep cutters of Germs, the popper-addled snide ramblings of Jello and the Kennedys and many others too numerous to name. Maybe a few: Blink-182, Green Day and the Offspring were label-salivatingly catchy acts who were on the wind of the ’90s music industry turning punk into less about the rebel and more about the payola; less PIL, more Pistols.
The primo spot in the Golden State’s punk zeitgeist is between the fringes of their unrivalled hardcore scene. From the Bay were the incredibly forward-thinking screamo delights of Portraits of Past and the angularly distorted hybrid slowcore-post-rock gumbo that was A Minor Forest; similarly out of Los Angeles, the emo-sometimes-screaming catharsis of Strictly Ballroom stood in severe contrast to the psychedelic grindcore stylings of Gasp. Leaving one last important stop in the coastside tour of rage and dissonance, the comparatively humble hills and further Central America-straddling heat-trap of San Diego, and the coup de gras of thee post-hardcore sound, Drive Like Jehu.
Their album Yank Crime from 1994 is their most well-known, and even still it’s a shame for it not being more well-known. Hanging around the time of the greats of pacing and pique – Slint and Unwound, for starters – the record is a real genesis moment for the cross-section of tension and space, not to mention tone, because the Big Muff pedal, Marshall head and Telecaster sound is crisp, angry and present with no regard to restraint.
“Do You Compute,” a track that genuinely feels like first-wave post-rock gone sour, begins with a near two-minute-long repetitious intro that feels intentionally tricking in its subtlety; syncopated twinklings of vacuum tube plucks and suspenseful, plotting drums bring the song into its explosive moment, with a mix of frustrated screaming and seductively alluring spoken word by frontman Rick Froberg overtop over-the-top feedback. Its seven-minute runtime hardly feels the length.
Two tracks that run longer than “Do You Compute” on Yank are ones of spectacle, of sheer disbelief, and certainly favorites of mine: “Luau” and “Sinews” – admittedly “Super Unison” runs sheerly longer than “DYC,” but we’ll get to them.
“Sinews,” more so than “Luau” but with the same complement to the latter, is slow, really slow. I mean, you think punk and you think that volatile, pummeling driving sound of the ’80s and the beer-spilled house shows, the iron-burned patches, B.O. pungency and rusted clothespins, but these nine-minute echelons feel more like a torpid, torrid opium den, humming with gothic fire, somehow dark and luminescent at the same time. Acts like Shellac, Unwound and certainly Slint toed this line during that era, but here was this heat-crazed relentlessness that came across in that of a man gripping at the earth of the Colorado Desert, waving his fist with the last bits of terminal rally in the direction of God, damning him, clinging on to life, yet dying so, so slowly – really, these songs are palpably listless.
Genuine slowcore post-hardcore, but with lyrics to boot; “Sinews” is a last-straw slurry of fury written through the eyes of the infidelity casualty Froberg, pissed but allowing air for the ire to bubble, swell, ruminate, seeping through with nothing lacking in the way of nuance. It builds like a depressed man walking home with rekindling flowers in hand, only to open the door to unfamiliar clothes strewn about, and the song rises and rises with anger, as Froberg fumingly follows the stripped garments with sand-grit teeth toward an ajar room where, simply, the setting overcomes him, and he throws the TV, the jewelry box, the slippers, the bed and last but not least, the man out of the window, with oil-flamed eyes frantically scrawling the interior with poor respect to feng shui. This is “Sinews”: a trip of indignant spite and sluggish exacerbation.
“Luau,” however, is less interpretable, being an explicit commentary on the ravaged land of Hawaiian natives by the tourist economy – a notion whose irony is probably not lost on a band hailing from a coastal town seized by the United States after the Mexican-American War. The song reads much like a deservingly vindictive populus mauling and lashing back at invaders and crusaders, yet instead of with weapons of propaganda, chemicals, gunpowder and blunt-force trauma, Jehu here use squealing, jittering digital guitar feedback, looping guitar riffs and ever-consistent drum lurchings complemented by the peg-legged tripping ¾ rhythm, all encapsulated underneath an acrimonious Froberg, with snarky yelps of the guttural variety aplenty.
Outside of these goliath hypnotic anthems, Yank Crime is punctuated and predicated by quippy, smart punk songs, whose math-rock elements are worn on their sleeves with dignity; “Golden Brown” and “New Math” remain unstopped with no freneticism bridled; they burn on at a wildfire’s pace, with tone more like the metalcore stylings of Converge or Botch, who were both a few years away, respectfully. The former is more a balls-out skate video soundtrack documenting hoodlums grinding on staircases under the altars of Hell, and the latter some sort of lopsided back and forth time-signature-changing overture above a bloodied, swanga-rimmed Mad Maxian chase scene between skull-emblazoned dune buggies toppling acres of cacti. “Human Interest” is perhaps the most straightforward track here, with its evident Bleach-like vocals cozied up to the Daydream Nation sprawls of discordant, dejected, distressed and defiant instrumentation. As the lead-in to “Sinews” and the lead-out of “New Math,” it works well as a buffer between highly conceptual tracks without holding any punches in its trim 3:24 runtime.
“New Intro” is quite interesting, by far the most subdued track on the record that doesn’t exactly evolve into anything; it feels much like something like “For Dinner” or “09-15-00 (cont.),” where the surrounding bounds of the rest of the record is chock with such inherent vigor and unabashivity that its somber, more Mogwaian languid stroll acts as a much-needed – but to some maybe lopsided – break in the chaos; caring less, I’m all for variety, and that sudden back-half of white noise effect pedal cacophony seals the deal before gesturing forward into “New Math.” Note: I’m writing this in regard to the album’s stream –available and congruent to the CD release tracklist – of which it’s been over 20 years since Jehu guitarist John Reis and OLI last touched Yank’s CD master – not the in-print vinyl release whose programming has these last three songs – “Human Interest,” “New Intro” and “New Math” – all on a companion 7” to the primary LP where “Luau” is instead of fourth, the third song on the record, and “Golden Brown” comes after “Super Unison”? Vinyl tracklists are a whole different thing, man.
Where was I? Oh yes, “Super Unison.” The third-longest cut begins with its proto ”We Invent You” droning feedback before jumping into more Nirvana-adjacent recalcitrance and thee Youth-inspired gargantuan post-rock jams, but this feels more like the predecessors to those bands: a conglomeration of Branca-tinged concrete jungles and Iggy-drenched rendering plants seen through the gaze of a Joshua Tree campee who accidentally poisoned himself with purportedly fun fungi, hectic in a pursuit to get un-lost, trawling day and night across burning grains and icy mud, ending in a final hopelessly necrotic crescendo like if Dinosaur Jr. got the demo tapes of OK Computer and decided to sesh some songs out with an unbroken Velvets crew who were penning the commandments of math-rock. This reality doesn’t exist, but Yank Crime does in ours, and it strings together these future and past sounds with ease, well worth a staunch level of pride and public recognition, for I’d say other groups to competently flesh out this sound on succeeding projects are few and far between – the disconsolate emoviolence scene of Orchid and pageninetynine come remarkably close, as are those fray bizarro noise-rock outfits like U.S. Maple or Melt-Banana.
All that’s left to remark on is the intro to the record, “Here Come The Rome Plows,” where debauchery is tandem with intricacy with its oscillations of voraciousness that beckon in and overthrow the stereoscape like some crazed overstimulated militia captain laying waste to swathes of land, reaping countrysides with little wherewithal and uprooting any living thing in its path. Germane and misconceivable again for its sonic analogy of Rome, Georgia-built plows that terrorized the forests of Southeast Asia during Kennedy’s escalation of the Vietnam war, the track’s brutal symbolism is apparent in its rampant punk tirelessness, hungry for blood and unnecessitated intervention, bursting at the bilges with frenetic disregard and destruction; all this through some metal strings on wood and wood sticks on polyester film, but again it’s Froberg’s vocals that seal the deal, insatiable and brash, immediate and unforgiving; they cast an image of something sinister, smirking, power-drunk and beyond reprehension – evil, most certainly.
That’s the caveat here, and as with most punk, it comes from an observant and anti-establishment mindset, philosophical in its intention to speak louder on more critical subjects than the love and hurt that takes up much of the contemporary; the why is the point, and Drive Like Jehu got this down to a T, with social commentary whose talking points aren’t too aloof or conceptual but without being innocuously benign of intention, and not devoid of its relevance now. Yank Crime remains today in fabulous strength and staying power, violent in nature, confident in practice, with the great talent of Rick Froberg, who passed in June 2023, on full display for the listener to marvel in and wince at, kept alive in our intradomicile headbangings and white-knuckled commutes.