You're Not Punk, and I'm Telling Everyone

VS

#8 The Get Up Kids- Four Minute Mile vs. #9 The Thermals- Fuckin' A


The year is 2000, and I've just returned to my hotel room from a Berkeley Tower Records with the new Smashing Pumpkins album Machina. Proud of my new purchase, I run into my roommate at this conference (MUN, natch), Matt Kaplan, who informs me he just found the greatest album ever made on 7". He is referring to Four Minute Mile, an album I've never heard of, by the Get Up Kids, a band I've never heard of. Rather than ask him for a listen, I scoff, probably mumble something about the Beatles, and slip my new CD into my discman. Machina, it should be noted, is terrible, and Kaplan later moved on to hardcore and straight edge, and then law school. I, on the other hand, moved muscially to a place where he wasn't so far off.

The Arguments: Four Minute Mile is not the greatest album ever made, but its is pretty excellent, and better than I remember. In the interest of full disclosure, (theres a pun in there somewhere) when my computer crashed last winter I had to re-rip all of my cds, and for some reason only half of 4MM made it back. So I hadn't heard it in a while. And it is great. While the Get Up Kids went on to make albums that meant more to me, were more "emo", and sucked more, this album is actually close to perfect. Perfect for shouting along to in the car, at shows, or moping along to on a bleak winter day. It reached its peak for me when I left for school, as it is (as much of GUPK early output is) lyrically often concerend with leaving home, leaving people, and relationships across a distance, but there haven't been many times in my life when something on this album wasn't resonant ("Shorty", maybe my least favorite song, was the anthem of a prolonged argument/falling out between my sometime-friend-sometime-arch-nemesis in high school, Sebastian Clark). While Matt Pryor certainly doesn't have the best voice around, and the recording isn't amazing, the sound is urgent and driving, the lyrics heartfelt and pithy at the same time ("I don't want you to love me anymore...than enough" was the first one that got me) and the album's overall arc is impressive, from the drive and angsty outpouring of the first couple of tracks through the slow burn of album closer "Michelle with one 'L'".

Fuckin' A opens with a track that my brother has called "the most punk song of all time" (and he should know). Of their three albums to date, Fuckin' A is the best example of The Thermals throw back punk/pop-punk...a scant 12 songs on an album totalling 27 minutes, but each packing quite the wallop...like a shot of concentrated rock (thats a terrible sentence). While there is nary a bad song on the album, and there are certainly standouts ("A Stare Like Yours") and I love their politics ("God and Country" is a great precursor to the anthemic message of The Body the Blood the Machine; the band refused to let Hummer use "It's Trivia" from their debut for a commercial), strangely, even 27 minutes is almost too much. It's not that the songs are bad or boring, its just that this album (and the one before it) stick pretty closely to a formula, driving guitar, swing drums, verse-chorus-verse and out, and it becomes repetitive and harder to hear the standouts as standouts. This is, unfortunately, mirrored in their live shows, which while fun and powerful (like the music) feature the band doing almost the exact same movements and patterns on every song. This album is perfect for my shuffle tendancies...any two or three songs at any given time are great, but as a coherent album leaves a little variety to be desired.

Score: A classic early emo (said completely unprejoratively) album takes down a great collection of songs by up and coming punks

Four Minute Mile d. Fuckin' A 86-53

Representative Tracks: