by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
Rick Froberg never seemed to have a larger-than-life mentality, even if his contributions to music were. From an outside perspective, he appeared humble, his music vehemently agitated, but his disposition welcoming and friendly, his laugh as radiant as his howl. His iconic voice is one in a million, harsh and ragged in a way that was uniquely melodic, brilliantly matched to the insistent music that defined his career. Over the weekend John Reis broke the tragic news that Froberg had passed away of natural causes at the age of 55. It’s an unbelievably heartbreaking loss and first and foremost we want to send our love and condolences to all his family, friends, and everyone close to him.
It’s safe to say that Rick Froberg’s music - from Pitchfork and Drive Like Jehu to Hot Snakes and Obits - has had a profound impact on so many here at Post-Trash and beyond, and we’re forever grateful for the entire discography that Froberg leaves behind (as well as his incredible visual art and design aesthetic, which really deserves its own special praise). While a more general piece is coming from a writer far more accomplished than myself, I wanted to dedicate this week’s “Album of the Week” feature to Rick Froberg’s memory, paying our respects to him and Drive Like Jehu’s timeless classic, Yank Crime, a record that sounds equally astonishing after hundreds of listens as it did after the first. This is not a eulogy, but a thank you.
For a band that only released two records and single over a five year stretch, the weight of what Drive Like Jehu accomplished feels immeasurable. Their influence looms large, they’ve inspiring a breed of post-hardcore, art punk, and noise rock bands for three decades and counting. The San Diego quartet - Froberg, Reis, Mike Kennedy, and Mark Trombino - played music with a caustic ferocity and a sharp focus. Their songs were complex, darting around contorted structures with time signatures collapsing and expanding with fluidity. Perhaps serving as a cornerstone in the formation of “math rock,” Drive Like Jehu never sounded clinical or overtly complex (even when it was), due primarily to the impenetrable feedback and density that nestled their music. Froberg and Reis built up a tornado of honed in detonations, carefully arranged while inescapably primal. The band’s self-titled debut was stellar, introducing their sound unto an unsuspecting world, drawing upon influences ranging from Wipers to Rites of Spring and in turn recreating brainy punk with a super-charged fission of piercing sprawl. In the wake of that album, Drive Like Jehu, like many great but not quite commercially viable bands, found themselves moving to a major label, in their case Interscope. For everyone that has spent the last twenty nine years listening to Yank Crime (or any portion of that time), it’s clear that joining a major did nothing to diminish the band’s ferocity. If anything, it somehow had the opposite effect, Yank Crime is uncompromising, a record that eschews radio friendly accessibility in favor of expanded exercises in abrasion and Earth-shaking harmonics. As four of the album’s nine songs stretched beyond the seven minute mark, Drive Like Jehu put artistic focus before anything else, developing a sound as rooted in patience as it was aggression.
The band kicked down the door with “Here Come The Rome Plows,” a battering ram of an album opener, one that signified the nuance, attention to detail, blistering detours, and relentless attack of everything that lie ahead. The symbiotic pairing of Froberg and Reis’ guitars wrapped themselves in knots, needling like opposing forces, imploding upon intersection. It’s loud, abrasive, and at times atonal, grinding through piercing distortion with a technicolor spark. For all the wrought tension, it’s strangely melodic in a way that hasn’t been repeated so triumphantly since. Rick Froberg’s wailing yelps are a big part of it, he’s not exactly cleaning up or smoothing out the violent textures, but his rasp forces a melodic cohesion, howling in unison with a singular thread of guitar, forming an emphasis within in the chaos and carnage. From there the astoundingly primal misalignment only gets deeper, locking into the hypnotic “Do You Compute,” an anthem of thick headed animosity. Built around a dizzying riff that feigns repetition with subtle shifts before careening off the rails entirely, the rhythm section fight to keep everything in place. It could be quintessential Drive Like Jehu, a flagrant example of determined feedback paired together with the most unlikely of hooks. To call it catchy feels misleading, but it’s fucking catchy, earworms abound. Then there’s “Luau,” one of the greatest songs ever written (as far as I’m concerned, at least). With a rhythm that rides deep in the pocket, Drive Like Jehu came to boogie. It’s not exactly a happy song, lamenting the damage done to Hawaii in the name of ceaseless tourism, but the divergent guitars are locked into a groove thick as bricks, pulling and pushing in opposite directions, weaving itself into a helix of careening melodies. There’s a desire to just keep plowing forward, ratcheting up the intensity, peeling back into dizzying progressions, only to explode in time with a cataclysmic force. For nine and a half minutes not a moment is wasted. The landscape is evergreen, each throbbing repetition and seismic shift a tonal masterwork, clawing its way to a point of mangled finesse.
While the music throughout Yank Crime is inherently patient, Froberg’s lyrics seem to stem from a place of patience lost. He’s had enough. Snide quips becomes increasingly agitated, but his indignation always seems to come paired with a smirk. He suffers no fools but Froberg never seemed all that hung up about it either. He makes his peace and moves on along the band’s jagged path. Whether he’s accepting fate on “Golden Brown,” sketching paranoia on “Super Unison,” or reviling in deviance with “New Math,” there’s a disdain that runs through his voice. He isn’t pleased, and he’d like us all to know, yet he’s laughing all the while. The caustic explosiveness of “Sinews,” which finds the entire band in impeccable free-fall seems to capture Froberg exploring a relationship soured as one side looks down upon the other, but rather than resign to be someone’s “trash man,” he’s showing them the door with a swift kick in the ass. The ignition is lit and the fuse is forever burning closer, anxieties decimated in the process.
Front to back, Yank Crime is about as perfect as an album gets. While some records can slip into a complacent state of listening over time with familiarity, the spark of this masterpiece remains forever gleaming. Accept no substitutions. Yank Crime is as immersive as it is brutal, as ugly as it is captivating, a timeless record that changed the way a lot of people thought about music.
[Epilogue]
I’ve seen a lot of shows over the years, but anytime I think back on the best performances I’ve ever witnessed, Drive Like Jehu always come to mind. While I was just an elementary school kid during the band’s initial run, I was lucky enough to catch their short lived reunion back in 2016 at New York City’s Irving Plaza. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing both Obits and Hot Snakes a handful of times (each being a genuine delight), but getting the opportunity to see Drive Like Jehu was something else entirely, a near spiritual journey soaked in noise, dissonance, and reckless feedback. The band delivered on a level close to perfection. With a set that favored the immaculate Yank Crime, their performance felt raw, unglued, and entirely combustible. The tension between partners-in-crime John Reis and a slightly less than sober Rick Froberg was palpable, but there in lies the magic of Drive Like Jehu, their music thrives on tension, the uneasy balance resulting in sheer discordant bliss. For a band that built a sound on really wrangling melody out of blistering feedback, everything seemed to find its place that night, their twin caterwauling guitars seemed to embrace the disarray (regardless of how they might have felt on that given night). If by chance it wasn’t the tightest set they had ever played, it didn’t matter, it was enveloping and brilliant, an evening I will never forget.
Thanks for everything.