by Matty McPherson (@ghostplanetmatt)
Depending on your neck of the woods amongst where your counterculture social medias happen to collide, you might have caught an upload in mid-June to dailydoseofskateclips. One clip that happened to feature a particularly snot-nosed degenerate synth-blast of fury soundtracking a young whippersnapper speeding down a hill like an SNES 16-bit skateboard adventure game. The cut, “Disney Adult Contemporary,” is really one of an innumerable amount of potential introductions to the world of Public Phone School and their deliciously fried self-titled. Twelve minutes of fame laser encoded to compact disc.
Although perhaps your introduction was from one of their many DIY gigs that definitely did exist. Or off the cuff mentions in their Philadelphia scene where these cuts have long gestated for half a decade but remained in their own limbo states. Or perhaps its just through Bandcamp or here because of an unholy marriage of CD art aesthetics (by Ant) and the promise of a white belt revival that renews the frenetic flavors of the sorely missed Locust. You'd think it'd have taken a year or more for someone to put that Skinamarink phone on a cover or ape the tough guy cornball-baggery of Gee Tee's Goodnight Neanderthal; it only took someone half a year to renew the potential and dig deeper into certain warped nostalgic strains got deep fried.
For as much as PPS' self-titled debut here does absolutely fulfill the "synthfried degenerate punk" that'll one day net them a Gonerfest slot, it also is strangely cross-appealing enough and runs parallel to strains in other, deeper online music. PPS does not peg itself as hyperpop, but if it catches your ears as such it is likely because of just how skater-oriented this music and its major key whiplash can dip into. As the umbrella label's sub-genres all strike out their own identities, the sounds have turned closer to wild synth-punk shapes. The truth is that PPS have been veterans in their own DIY scene and stuck offline; their nostalgia is not unremembered but truly akin to taking an orange Pete and Pete VHS and snorting it to see what color their synths should be or what today’s mantra will suffice. Opener “BFD in BFE,” the cut that most resembles hyperpop, is scooter cruisin’ slop that presents the genre's fixation on bright textures and dissonant bleeping look too chilled. Other cuts like “Walker Texas Instruments” or “Docs in a Row” more or less invoke frantic secret Tony Hawk Pro Skater zones. The kinds where the objective is less "collect the coins" and "attempt to Noclip out of the area and personally attack a Neversoft employee for not making THPS 5". The synth pops and fried out guitars/bass never grate on each other and everything has been fine tuned to almost never-approach the two minute mark. Ideas are not sabotaged or rushed for the dance floor with a nefarious swagger; a significant amount of inside humor is left merely to the titles.
Therein lies what makes the twelve minutes of PPS exceptionally worth its physical CD and staying in rotation. These cuts are populist without ever succumbing to being their own outlandish, uninviting electro-violence; it only takes about three to five seconds for the package to win you over. Return back to that skateboard video with “Disney Adult Contemporary,” "I DON’T RIDE MY SKATEBOARD ANYMORE. I WANNA PISS OUT A WINDOW. I WANNA START A FIGHT AT A BAR. FUCK START UP CULTURE. IM INVESTING IN A 401K. I'M BUYING A SUBARU. THESE ARE ALL THE THINGS I WANT!”' It sounds more like an endorsement for Connor O'Malley's gritty reboot of Mickey Mouse ("like Euphoria") than anything I can remember in recent memory, and that's enough to keep it in the car for the rest of summer.
A tangent on the release: PPS quietly partnered with Mutual Skies, a web-label that launched last year. Mutual Skies is immensely focused on one mission: quality CDs, emphasis on the artist. You really won't find an immense amount of information about what exactly connects Kraus, Ringlets, a Chief Keef bootleg, Bedlocked, or PPS. Nor does it really matter, because the CD packaging has been a lean, detail-oriented machine and the surprise releases are worth the purchase without any mp3 listens or Bandcamp skims. The curation, alongside cached media, Husky Pants, and Tripticks Tapes' CD bundles, are signs of a new wave of CD-oriented labels run by seasoned DIY veterans that care to bring the product to its audience. Bypassing the middleman, as well as infernal delays of literally any other format, today's Bandcamp CD labels are sleek and swift enough to provide situated taste and curation for the long-tail long-riders, and in cases like this are powerhouses at pushing unique new music experiences to dedicated listeners.