Review: Direct Hit! – “#4″
When we last heard from Wisconsin pop-punkers Direct Hit! on their excellently gory 2009 EP #3, they had just been attacked by zombies. The newly released follow-up, cleverly titled #4, begins with frontman Nick Woods dodging violence once again, this time in the form of a human assailant: “I’m looking out for falling knives and bricks because I heard you’ve got a bone to pick with me” are the first words you hear, aside from the now-familiar “Fuck you! Get pumped!” slogan that’s become the group’s vulgar trademark. Throughout the four tracks offered here, the band also face off against monsters, nostalgia, and, as Earth explodes in the background, the loneliness of deep space – proving, once and for all, that no matter where these guys go, they can’t escape the carnage. But that’s OK. They’re well-equipped to deal with it, and it makes for compelling, charmingly handmade music.
Actually, cha
rming might not be the first word that comes to mind when describing Direct Hit!’s music. They’ve got all the classic signifiers of their genre down pat – the chugging guitars, the rubbery basslines, profane lyrics screamed in gang-vox unison for maximum effect – but everything is cranked up to a slightly higher pitch than normal. So while a lot of bands play fast, Direct Hit! sound absolutely frantic, pounding their instruments like their lives literally depend upon making the rudest, most calamitous racket possible. And while the average band might throw the aforementioned gang vox in for a chorus, DH! lay them on for entire songs sometimes. Starting a song in overdrive is a tricky business – where do you go from there? The band’s fearless belief that, no matter what, there’s another level they can reach (and the chaos that ensues from such a brash philosophy) are what ultimately set them apart from their peers. Also: there’s the songs, which are fucking great.
Lead-off track “Snickers Or Reese’s (Pick Up The Pieces)” establishes that the guys are still under siege; Woods recommends the aggrieved party chomp some sugary snacks to calm down. Meanwhile, ”Monster In The Closet” pushes the band’s obsession with supernatural horror much further than #3 did – folded into the comical, childish tale of “a gate into another dimension” is real pathos: “And now I’m gone, gone, gone / Don’t you regret / Never giving me the time you say you’d spend?” Combine that with a central melody that approaches Blink-182 levels of terminal catchiness, and you’ve got yourself the first great punk song of 2010.
“Choke” and “In Orbit” comprise the disc’s back half, and both deepen the band’s mythology in interesting ways. “Choke” tells tales of youth misspent in the pursuit of “nicotine, obscenity, caffeine,” and it sounds like a great time until Woods purges on the chorus: “It tastes so sweet to me I feel like I might choke.” And “In Orbit” closes #4 on a light, sweet note: the gang is in space, drinking “tea for two” served by a robot, trying hard not to think about the world they left behind. And it’s here that we start to notice, perhaps, a throughline in all of the band’s material to date: there are death threats, zombies, monsters, bombs constantly falling. This is war zone music.
The characters in Direct Hit! songs face even more pressure, if possible, than those that populate the world created by the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn – Charlemagne had to worry about getting busted by the cops for whatever was in his sweatsocks, but he never faced a legion of the undead. And so the universe of Direct Hit! really takes coherent shape here, intentionally or not; these are songs about plucky, agitated kids that face insurmountable odds. Sometimes they live to get pumped another day; sometimes the monster wins. Direct Hit! is that kind of band, and I look forward to whatever nightmares they cook up for #5.
(#4 is available as a pay-what-you-want download at Direct Hit!’s website. Assault.it strongly suggests you drop at least five bucks for it.)
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#4 is another great addition to the library. Can’t wait for DH to get pumped in Madison again. I’m
hoping for an outdoor terrace performance this summer!??? GET PUMPED. -Bucky
[...] to Slam Castle (3738 Addison). If you haven’t picked up the band’s wicked new EP #4, get it now so you can memorize the lyrics before show time! This has been described to me as a [...]