Describe a hard thing. It’s got rocks in its guts and sand in its teeth. It’s unrelenting. It would never tell you of its discomfort.
A hard thing asks for no quarter. It would rather you spit in its eye.
Allentown, Pennsylvania is a hard thing, associated with steel and trains (and maybe a Billy Joel song, risking a digression). Born of that, Pissed Jeans is good old American hardcore, a blistering fusion of noise and grunge and garage influence that will have the thesaurus open to words such as “harsh” or perhaps “furious.”
The last album, Hope For Men, had the thesaurus frequently open to “promising.” It possessed in ten songs a sort of off-kilter, absurdist zeitgeist, distinguishing itself from forerunners with sprawling songcraft (hardcore songs longer than seven minutes) and an unapologetic sense of sentimentality, some of it brought off in chillingly good spoken word.
Forward two years, and their new album, King Of Jeans, feels different—not in the sense of departure though, more in the way when the feeling of evolution momentarily settles. Hope beyond hope is that this isn’t where Pissed Jeans end up. Most bands would (should) be proud of these eleven tracks, thrashing, havoc-wreaking, the sort of beautiful disaster that cannot be ignored until someone wisely unplugs the power source. The songs on King Of Jeans, while still strong, would not have been among the standouts on its predecessor.
There is no “I’ve Still Got You (Ice Cream)” in the mix, and that’s a shame.
I open the thesaurus and turn to the word “temporary,” as in a temporary, hopeful state. My sense is that I won’t put King Of Jeans aside permanently—just long enough to hear the next turn from the hardest thing out of Allentown.
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