Pissed Jeans: Shallow

Hardcore ironists’ debut album revisited.

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The world at large may not have felt hugely bereft at being unable to get their hands on the long-deleted debut album from Pissed Jeans, the noise-punks who once declared their ambition to make “the musical equivalent to watching a toilet flush”, but lovers of thrillingly infantile hardcore surely have reason to rejoice at this reissue.

Of course, they were into them before the hipsters, so they probably regard this ‘remastered’ version of something so anything-but-mastered as a sell-out.

For the rest of us, there’s still much to enjoy. Boring Girls sounds like a band of 14-year-old delinquents taking the template of the Beastie Boys’ Fight For Your Right and attempting to run with it while they still only know one chord. The discordant howl, clatter and skrang of I Broke My Own Heart is viscerally satisfying, and the epically repetitive four-chord drone of Wachovia simply will not be denied.

Meanwhile, the mordant, faux-sulky teenager wit hinted at by song titles like Ashamed Of My Cum adds another level of dumb fun to proceedings. All told, a glorious reminder of what a wonderfully obnoxious racket you can make without even being able to play properly./o:p

Johnny Sharp

Johnny is a regular contributor to Prog and Classic Rock magazines, both online and in print. Johnny is a highly experienced and versatile music writer whose tastes range from prog and hard rock to R’n’B, funk, folk and blues. He has written about music professionally for 30 years, surviving the Britpop wars at the NME in the 90s (under the hard-to-shake teenage nickname Johnny Cigarettes) before branching out to newspapers such as The Guardian and The Independent and magazines such as Uncut, Record Collector and, of course, Prog and Classic Rock