Item! “America’s getting stranger!”
If that’s the sort of statement that makes you sit up and take notice, then you’re going to want to rush off and cop the new Panthers LP Things Are Strange. But if this album’s fatuous title is a turnoff, and if the sentiment embodied above strikes you as something that kind of actually has no fucking meaning, then you just saved yourself some money. This four-piece’s third LP, Things Are Strange is presumably Panthers’ take on what’s going down on the rough streets of hipsterfied Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It’s also as dim, self-satisfied and incoherent a piece of trendy blather to come down the pipe in quite some time. Panthers has a classy pedigree – all members played with different politically aware hardcore groups in the ‘90s, and they’ve got important friends in bands like Erase Errata, Black Dice and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs – and apparently has a ferocious live show (I’ve never seen them). But they’ve also got an album stuffed to its queasy gills with dead-in-the-water seven-minute “punk” songs, sludgy breakdowns and self-consciously “smart” song titles that would leave Michel Foucault slapping the shit out of his bald-ass forehead. In short, it is the acme of contemporary hipster bullshit, and doesn’t even have the good sense to shut up and start playing hard. And now I’ve got to calm down.
So, what’s wrong with Things Are Strange? It’s not the touchstones: Panthers are clearly going for a sort of heavied-up take on the agit-rock of bands like MC5, and that’s cool enough. But name-dropping song titles (“Theory Is Famous,” “My Commodities Have Been Fetishized”) do not equal political awareness, or even anything more than the sensation of overhearing some undergrads muddling through a hungover poststructural exegesis. And lyricist/vocalist Jayson Green’s tendency for faintly political non sequiturs (“let’s get in the street, right, and fight it out” is the defining sentiment of a song called, um, “Stroke My Genius”) doesn’t necessarily have to be a death sentence – I just got finished reviewing the new Interpol record, for instance, and Paul Banks’ white-temptress-of-the-sea lyricism on that album is painful, but doesn’t cripple the record.
Green’s tuneless delivery doesn’t help much, though, and the fact that he’s kicking his little raps over bombastic and defiantly dull music pretty much seals the deal. As a rule, Things Are Strange’s shorter songs are better, but there’s a bizarre lack of intensity to these guys’ sonic “assault.” Many songs do fit a certain punk prototype, but forget the vital first Law of Fugazi: even a muddled and self-important statement is palatable if it rocks hard enough. Forget about Panthers’ politics for a moment, though. A song about how Green wants to “have sex when I want to/I’m too busy to take my time” (“Walk of Shame”) isn’t new or, uh, interesting, but it does have predecessors. But these songs are, without exception, appalingly overlong and weirdly puffed-up with petulant self-importance. Panthers’ tendency towards long buildups to unmoving breakdowns – the flatlined, brainless protest rocker “We Are Louder” is seven minutes long, as is “Walk of Shame” (which at least moves a little) and the ungainly, clownishly unintense “If You Were Young Once, Rage” is nearly eight – doesn’t serve them well. This is the sound of pseudointellectual trendies imagining themselves into 1) political significance and 2) rock and roll heroism. It fails brutally on both fronts. The political lyrics are too steeped in check-me-out name-dropping and facile posturing to feel convincing for even a moment. And the music is sludgy and deadly dull where it should be hard, fast and mean. Stack Things Are Strange up against a great political record like The Thermals’ new Fuckin’ A – which is sincere and strong and convincingly angry and aware – and Panthers’ weaknesses are devastatingly obvious. While it’s not clear what Panthers are acting all fired up about, it is quite clear that it’s not worth caring about. |