Hello, I am Link and this is my first review for Up The Pucks. I churned reviews out for over a year over at my now retired Puck and Punk blog, and I am excited to be back writing them for my loving, doe-eyed overlords Peter and Brandon. One thing that I do, or don't do I guess, is assign a rating to an album because what I want is to give you an impression of the sound and feel of the music. Then you can listen to it and decide for yourself.
Classics of Love - Self-Titled album (purchase)
cover art by Jesse Michaels
If the name Jesse Michaels doesn’t ring a bell, he was the vocalist/lyricist for ska/punk pioneers Operation Ivy and the genre bouncing Common Rider. Well, he, plus the Hard Girls, is now back with us as the front man of his new band Classics of Love (presumably named after the opening track of Common Rider’s first album “Last Wave Rockers”). Now that the history is out of the way we can move on to the album itself. The self-titled album is, and I say this in the briefest way possible, a wall of hardcore punk deliciousness. The entire thirteen-track album is over in just about twenty-two and a half minutes, an amount that turns out to be the perfect length. The only possible weak point in the album’s pacing is track 6 Moving Pictures, a much slower tempo song that always reminds me of a heavier Common Rider song. Standing on its own I think it’s actually pretty good, and it does allow the listener to catch a breath before the final sprint to the end.
Lyrically this album has a classic punk rock feel. Michaels heaps criticism on the wealthy, politicians, the lazy and fanatical religious, lobbyists, corporations, media empires and more. I was actually pretty impressed as to how many words he was able to fit into a brief twenty-two minutes of music. An area where one could knock the lyrics is the balance between meaning and poetics. At times the poetry can really obfuscate the meaning, in fact in sometimes seems like meaning is ignored for the poetry. It comes down to a manner of taste then. I don’t mind some nice poetry as long as the content isn’t lost, but some people might not enjoy those lyrical elements.
So then, what does the album actually sound like? I’m sure that’s important. If you want another oversimplified description I’ll say that Michaels sounds like his Operation Ivy self, but with the maturity displayed from the Common Rider days onward. That aside the album teeters on a noisy seesaw between driving punk rock and pure hardcore. While as a whole I would call “Classics of Love” a melodic album, the band does find themselves playing pure hardcore on tracks such as Last Strike and Dissolve (Dissolve actually reminds me of some of the hardcore tracks off of The Suicide Machine’s “Battle Hymns.” I thought that was interesting). Since Jesse Michaels clearly loves it, the album also features a pair of ska/punk tracks in Castle in The Sky and Bandstand (again, interesting thing: both those songs talk a lot about castles [I bet they’re metaphors too]). On a final note, the album really sounds like a Jesse Michaels album. I’m not talking about his voice, but he certainly brings out guitar tones and a style of arranging his songs that you can go back to Common Rider, Operation Ivy, or, hell, Big Rig and really immediately understand that this is his music.