CD Review: Bomb the Music Industry! - “Scrambles”
Bomb the Music Industry! - “Scrambles”
(Quote Unquote Records)
As many times as I’ve written of Bomb the Music Industry! in the past, you’d think I’d've run out of things to say by this point. Nope! They just released their newest album, Scrambles, and it’s pretty goddamn great. It’s way more varied than their past few records, and those were pretty much everything but the kitchen sink.
Scrambles has a couple slower, acoustic numbers, which I certainly think will lend themselves pretty well to Mr. Rosenstock’s travels around the world with a guitar and iPod. The fast, crazy songs - of which there are the usual amount - are a little more focused, and have less dramatic tonal shifts than, say, To Leave Or Die On Long Island. The lyricism is less general, and more incitefully focused on topics like scene elitism (by both bands and fans) in songs like “Gang of Four Meets the Stooges (but Boring)” and “(Shut) Up The Punx!!!”
Even songs like “Can I Pay My Rent in Fun?” and “Saddr Weirdr” put forth the notion that music, while liberating, can be absolutely stifling to one’s life in general. The idea of spending your life seeing the country and playing music sounds like it’d be the greatest adventure ever, until you think about it and realise that you’re seeing the country through the windows of a van and a haze of cigarette smoke from onstage.
“Fresh Attitude, Young Body” and “25!” turn all of Scrambles into a sort of meditation as to what it’s like to get older, play music, and be poor. “Cold Chillin’ Cold Chillin’” and “Sort of Like Being Pumped” provide the bookends to the album, that along with the aforementioned songs about aging, give the album a certain sense of hope, that there are “messages that say that life’s better than this.”
The story of the whole recording story over at the discography page is amazing, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the copy from Asian Man that is, in Mike Park’s words, “an insane visual project as the CD, and comes with a 32 page zine with random brilliance and other ramblings from Jeff and friends, a sticker decoder for the cover, digipak and yup… to date, the most expensive CD we’ve put out.” Wow. In the meantime, download it for free (or a donation of your choice) below.
Download Scrambles here or, if you just want a taste, “Gang of Four Meets the Stooges (but Boring).”