Comprised of Matt Korvette (vocals), Brad Fry (guitar), Randy Huth (bass) and Sean McGuinness (drums), the Allentown, PA-based hardcore punk/noise rock quartet Pissed Jeans can trace their origins to when the members of the band met while attending Allentown’s Nazareth High School. Bonding over their initial desire to create, as the band’s Matt Korvette has explained, “a different kind of punk focused on dead-ended carnal cravings, sexual depression . . .” and to “bludgeon the listener with dull, monotonous, droning rock music that just sucks the energy of out, the musical equivalent of watching a toilet flush.” And over the course of their 13 years together as a band, they’ve released several 7 inches and four, full-length studio albums, all which have cemented their reputation for crafting a sound that’s a sludgy, furious, and punishing cretinous, troglodyte stomp that subtly nods at The Stooges, The Ramones and 80s hardcore punk and post-hardcore bands — while evoking the deep primal urges of our reptilian sub-brains.
With the band’s recently released fifth, full-length album Why Love Now, the Allentown, PA-based band focuses on the mundane comforts and discomforts of modern life — from fetish websites to office supply deliveries; to the emptiness, confusion, dissatisfaction and convoluted nature of modern relationships and our contemporary world of hypocrisy and bullshit. As Korvette explains in press notes on the new album, “Rock bands can retreat to the safety of what rock bands usually sing about. So 60 years from now, when no one has a telephone, bands will be writing songs like, ‘I’m waiting for her to call me on my telephone.’ Kids are going to be like, ‘Grandpa, tell me, what was that?’ I’d rather not shy away from talking about the Internet or interactions in 2016.”
Why Love Now’s incendiary and furious first single “The Bar Is Low” will further cement the band’s reputation for crating sludgy and bludgeoning cretinous trogolydte stomp-like anthems in which Korvette’s guttural, Lemmy Kilmister-like growling is paired with with pummeling drumming, a throbbing and insistent bass line, and blistering guitar chords to evoke a knuckle dragging, slack-jawed Neanderthal on the hunt. According to Korvette, the song is “about how every guy seems to be revealing themselves as a shithead. It seems like every guy is getting outed,” Korvette continues, “across every board of entertainment and politics and music. There’s no guy that isn’t a total creep. You’re like, ‘No, he’s just a dude that hits on drunk girls and has sex with them when they’re asleep.’ Cool, he’s just an average shithead.” Throughout the song, Korvette and company point out that stereotypical concepts of straight male, masculinity is defeating, empty, and clownish.
Directed by Joe Stakun, the recently released video follows the members of the band at the gym; but they don’t know how to properly use any of the equipment. And while there, the band begins an absurd and ridiculous competition with other gym goers that ends up with a hilarious and horrifying conclusion.
