Limited "Loser Edition" on "Coke Bottle Green" vinyl.
PISSED JEANS have never been a band that does things by halves - they're known for their ferocious vocals, their biting lyrics, their buzzsaw guitars and their boisterous live shows, and their sixth album "Half Divorced" is no exception. The songs skewer the tension between youthful optimism and the sobering reality of adulthood, and when viewed through frontman Matt Korvette's scowl, everything is presented on a level of violent absurdity. This is how Korvette growls in "Seatbelt Alarm Silencer": "Call it a death drive but that ain't fair / Drive implies I'm headed somewhere." So where does a band like PISSED JEANS go after almost twenty years of making music, after becoming fathers, after getting married and after getting divorced? Existence has solidified to a boiling point. Korvette says, "Half Divorced has an aggression in it that says I don't want this reality. There's a power in being able to say, I realize you want me to pay attention to these things, but I'm telling you they're not important. I'm already looking elsewhere." Even in the brutality that Korvette conjures up in songs like "Killing All the Wrong People" ("If violence is now their form of play / Let's aim 'em towards those who made 'em that way""), the energy of some of this is Songs unintentionally, well, funny. When you listen to this album, even the most hardened nine-to-fiver has the feeling that unrestricted freedom is still possible. And who else rhymes "colonizer" with "moisturizer"? "We're not the kind of band that puts out a new record every two years," says Korvette. "PISSED JEANS is really like an art project for us, and that's what makes it that way funny." This lack of restraint runs rampant in the songs, which unexpectedly veer into classic hardcore punk territory - often they're less than two minutes long and erupt like the Corvette's "Butane Tank Explosion" in "Junktime " sings. This distilled energy makes "Half Divorced" sound menacing and dangerous. Korvette says: "We realized that we've never really been into pop-punk and we thought this is something that won't be immediately recognizable as cool. So we want to challenge ourselves to make it cool for us feels." There's also a PINK LINCOLNS cover, "Monsters," on which Korvette sings, "People are more hideous than monsters." And in the final song, “Moving On,” Korvette mocks: “Cheesing into my cameraphone / Pretending that I’m not alone / Life’s the first thing that we all postpone.” One gets the feeling that PISSED JEANS refuse to "postpone" life in the same way - life, like art, is something that happens now, not later. *The word "Divorce" fits the moments of humiliation and shame that are displayed on this album for all to see. Korvette says, "If you say something enough times or just let it exist publicly, it loses its evil-monster-in-the-closet thing." There is clarity in light and in darkness, in marriage and in divorce. As the chorus of the final song cries: "I'm moving on, I'm moving on, I'm moving on."
