The (Ugly, Nasty, Pissed) Men Among Children

Pissed Jeans,Hope for Men, (Sub Pop): “The first rule of Pissed Jeans is, you do not talk about Pissed Jeans.” Matt Korvette, lead singer of this Allentown, Pennsylvania, band, works as a claims adjuster by day. By night, he sings in this band, which I take to be his own personal Fight Club — a wreck room for his masculine id. Their music — insane, uncontrolled, ugly — hearkens back to the glory days of the late-1980s punk rock subgenre known as “pigfuck,” once practiced by bands like Jesus Lizard and Big Black, and praised as a formative influence on Nirvana. (The ugliness was also the element most excised from the limp, post-grunge music of Nickelback and Creed.) Pissed Jeans brings pigfuck roaring back — with one small difference. Where Jesus Lizard and co. seemed genuinely misanthropic, Pissed Jeans tempers its anger with irony. The cover of Hope for Men features two shirtless office-worker types caught in an embrace, a nod to the fact that pigfuck always seemed like a parodic outgrowth of poet Robert Bly’s “men’s movement” (picture men hugging each other and bro’ing down — only in the woods rather than in a dimly lit bar). The key to understanding Pissed Jeans is that they aren’t so much about male rage as they are about male feelings. It’s a novel thematic twist on an old musical idea. Pissed Jeans Aug. 26 at the Fuck Yeah Fest at the Echo.

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Pissed Jeans: Guess which member is wetting himself right now. (Photo by Shawn Brackbill)

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• Peter Pan
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Fucked Up: When I saw this band perform a few weeks ago, lead singer Damian “Pink Eyes” Abraham jokingly stuck a drumstick between his buttocks. Yet this Toronto band has gone to great lengths to seem mysterious, creating a purposefully twisted discography — much of it vinyl only — in which they name-drop Opus Dei, outsider artist Henry Darger and his hermaphroditic Vivian Girls, Nazis, the pre-Christian Book of Enoch, France’s Situationist International, and Spanish Civil War–era anarchists. Guys, we get it, you’re a cultish clique of angry young people — and you’re goofy postmodernists, to boot. I’m not so impressed by the esoterica — their connection to the material seems calculated rather than passionate — but I love Fucked Up’s music, which is built on the foundation of “harder, faster” hardcore from the early ’80s (think Black Flag, Minor Threat, D.O.A., Cro-Mags). It’s captivating the way they take the energy of traditional two-minute hardcore songs; add flourishes like violin codas, drum solos and long passages of whistling; mix in touches of psychedelia and Krautrock; then end up with five-to-10-minute hardcore drones. The 2006 full-length debut, Hidden World, repeats a lot of ideas contained on their vinyl releases, but that doesn’t lessen its impact. Fucked Up just completed their first full U.S. tour.