She cringes when Paul Banks sings "the subway is a porno," but I can't hear the
words for the slurs, can never the fuck understand what he's saying. While Banks
adjusts his trousers, and Carlos D's Herpes slicks excretory sheen into his Crispin
Glover coif, Johnny Whitney lies down on the railings that never lay in the unread
sub(way)-text of Banks's empty lines, and, in that that voice of a "South Park" character,
sings "the subway is a numb field." His words are shrill wails of human pain
as he's bitten by an army of Crispin's double-crossed rats, every inch of every
incursion like the violated flesh of a humankind driven underground, blood-red
under the grey pallor of modernity, of post-millennial life as morgue, man rotting
as this planet of the apes lies dying, under the command of an Idiot King playing
Big God, raping souls whilst demanding his fellating populace be inured with
dragged-down-syndrome. Whitney's screams wield their words like a syringe, wailing "one
with fake porno tits, a padlock on her lips, disposable tan, biodegradable hands," the
wails married to Jordan Blilie's narrative conscience; the two sing, at once,
of trading in an old wife — "some things never get better, like used cars
and bad livers" — for a young one whose burnt-toast skin is orange like
a tarnished trophy. It ain't so easy to the fuck understand what they're singing,
but reading the litany of crimes on the lyric sheet of Crimes is nothing
but poetry, poetry in that way that song lyrics never are, profound both on page
and in song, with Whitney and Blilie on lyrical song in the songs on Crimes,
fourth-time-fine as the duo up the thematic ante of the combustible …Burn,
Piano Island, Burn on a disc that rescues hardcore polemics from the utterly
prosaic. The down-with-the-scene hardcore kids complain that The Blood Brothers
(who've apparently dropped the The) have gone soft even as they shine a record
hard as a diamond. Amidst the car-crash wreckage of the band's duality — the
twin voices wrapped together like twisted metal and mingled limbs, the sharp
guitar shards piercing the stretched flesh of the drums — Crimes depicts
the American Dream as nightmare, upward mobility stripped naked in front of a
sea of slack-jawed gawkers, pop culture's pantomimes striking hospital poses
as they're wheeled away from the scene of the impact, pimped ride as death machine,
dying as entertainment. Crimes is American Life as sacrifice, public executions
as popcorn fodder, injected men in neon-orange jumpsuits cut from the same cloth
as the deluded humans who believe their reality needs the validity of being witnessed
by a television nation, both offerings being immolated for sheer schadenfreude's
sake. There's little malicious pleasure to be had in this "pit of celebrity pregnancies," this
America of "soldiers spewing black cum from their victory hard-on," this Life
as refuse, human beings being "scrapped valentines" and "tangerine rinds." In
America: "The hangman selling tickets to the sparkling death scene/ Tonight we
watch the rope choke a conscience clean." This is America: "Brown summer, stench
wind/ The globe spinning on a rusty hinge/ Get in your car and go to your job/
Like a train that's being robbed." This is America: "I just want the flag to
be my baby/ But her kissing breath is so revolting/ Tastes like hospitals, machine
guns/ Burning hair, McDonald's buns." And this is America: "We're crimes, crimes,
crimes, crimes, crimes."
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