by Zak Mercado (@ciaoguaglione)
Living in a milieu of deeply melodic, “pretty” music, it’s rather jarring to experience hardcore music sans context. There’s something primal, even somewhat Hobbesian (a la state of nature) about hardcore/punk music. In many ways, it’s an incredibly “masculine” style of music. Often that “masculinity” is mistaken for violence or a slacker form of rock. However, the masculine signifier could also relate to precision and concision. It can be anger leading to concision — after all, not every burst of anger is prolonged, and anger can also stem from morally just indignation. My America by Insane Urge is a terse, even flying and fleeting, record. The listener can never catch the band. It feels purely intended to be as such.
One of the tags the label or the band included on their Bandcamp page is “anti-logic.” Indeed, there is probably little profoundly logical about hardcore. The ferocity and rushed pace of this album, among other hardcore albums, shows little care for logic. Digging deeper, this group uses the logic defying pace and structure to flesh out their anti-capitalist doofus caricature and anarchic chaos ideals. On “No Sense,” the message is clear: “it never seems to go/ the way you planned./This life it makes/no sense.” As such, the stylistic approach to commenting on it doesn’t have to make sense either.
The album is concerned with the haves and have nots. “Nothing left to do/nothing left to eat/nothing left to be/in My America,” they say of the “have nots” on “My America.” That possessive “my” carries a lot of weight. The America handed to the younger generations can hardly feel possessed by them. Of the “haves,” on “Job,” they request, “Toss a scrap to the wailing poor/make them beg you pull and plead/just to afford their basic autonomy.” In the face of these circumstances, their solution is some form of anarchy or free riding, “take it/it’s free/why should I/pay for it?/take more than you need/what makes you think/they pay for anything?,” on “Take It.” Their moral justification is to take from the rich as the rich are exploiting everybody else.
While these are common themes in many punk songs, the approach Insane Urge offers shows a keen awareness to present circumstances. Their commentary through music and lyrics relates to contemporary times and their punk predecessors. All done in a mad-dash pace, the album clocking in at just over ten minutes. Overall, this group is having fun with these songs. On “Roswell,” the longest track on the record, the lyrics narrate an alien being abducted by scientists and the powers that be. It’s hard not to image the band coming up with this song without smirks on their faces. This amusement is not exclusive to any silliness or tongue-in-cheek punk cliché. The pace the band plays at and the brevity of the record feels like it was made with a love for the diversion of this hard-hitting music.
One must imagine oneself in the pit. One must imagine oneself in the basement getting one’s tympanic membrane blown to smithereens. This necessitates being heard live, or, at least, blasted as loud as possible from the cassette the band offers. The music and the cassette feel and appear handmade, with a lot of heart and passion magnetically etched in.