Pissed Jeans – King of Jeans

Rating:

On their third album, King of Jeans, Pissed Jeans come out firing, as you would expect them to do. It’s high energy barroom brawling, but in order to really dig deeply into their album, you would have to listen to the whole record extremely closely, which is often difficult to do given the intensity of the sonic force on display.

One of the difficulties in approaching this album is that you really can’t discern the relevance of the album.  It’s grounded in 90s hardcore, or even further back if you want to dance around with some of the influences. Still, a barrage of noise is not necessarily something that you find on the scene nowadays.  Perhaps this is refreshing in a certain regard, but in the end, you’re more than likely to lean back to teenage angst and nostalgia, or be turned off altogether.

Like most of the music the band wears upon its sleeve, you can barely follow the lyrics throughout the album.  Most of the vocals seem to waiver upon the screaming of various syllables, though the liner notes indicate otherwise. Even looking at the lyrics, you can’t really decide whether or not to take them too seriously.  It’s as if they come straight out of the notebook of a teenager, or some disgruntled youth trying to find his or her way.  Barking the lyrics doesn’t do much justice for the listener either, making the majority of the songs somewhat unlistenable.

Still, the album isn’t all filled with negativity, as this review may lead you to believe.  You have to be refreshed at the idea of a band bucking modern musical trends in pursuit of their own rewards.  Such a ferocity has not come across these ears in quite some time, and while that is probably due to age, albums like this tend to bring you back to your own angst-ridden collection, if you haven’t discarded everything at this point.

Probably one of the most enticing aspects, for those traveling the road of their past, is that the riffs even seem reminiscent of every hardcore band you listened to when you were at that phase of your life.  It comes off as a familiar rendition, yet done with a little bit more of an edge.  The ominous chords persist, and the growling vocals remind you of the band you always dreamed of making when you were in 9th Grade. Such is King of Jeans, fueled in the anger of our past dreams, turning and burning all the way.