Return of the Kings: Superchunk!

I was/am obsessed with Superchunk. Obsessed is maybe too strong a word, but it'll do. I saw them in (I think) November 1992 at Trax in Charlottesville, VA. I hadn't really heard them at the time, but I'd heard they were a great punk band. They were really really funny looking. I think Laura was wearing a grubby dress and a feather boa. The rest of them looked like they just came up out of the sewers. They were SO LOUD and they flew around the stage like maniacs. I stage dove into a crowd that was far too thin to warrant such acrobatics. I bashed up my elbow pretty bad. But you know, I thought then that that was what you did at punk shows.

And you know, Superchunk was definitely a punk band then. Not an indie band, or an indie/punk band, but an outright PUNK punk band. Fast loud nerd rage. I bought the VHS concert video "Take the Tube" and must have watched it 100 times. In it, they describe themselves as the "Kings of Punk" and I kind of think they mean it ironically and seriously at the same time. Anyway, they were a punk band then and I think they stayed one until ``Foolish" came out. I love that album and the ones after it, but there was a move from punk to indie and I always missed the punk.

No one in their right mind would call their new album punk rock, but on it you can hear them getting back to their roots a bit. And so, yeah, I'm happy of that.

The greatest song of all time, RIGHT NOW...

is ``Younger Us" by Japandroids. It is frakking insane how much I love this song. There are like maybe five songs in history that I have been as obsessive over as I am over this song. (They are "Pink Chimneys" (but not the album version!), "Strangelove", "True Faith", "You Got It", and "Foolish".) Everything about this song is amazing. The chorus on the guitar (which is a hallmark of this band) is just great! I think that all those early 90s Dischord bands put everyone in punk/indie rock off of chorus since they used it so much, but dammit it sounds so frakking good here and really fresh and unusual. The vocals are just great too, delivered with a real voice-cracking intensity. And there's this weird pre-chorus where it gets kind of even more intense as he delivers a line which probably has a few too many words to fit into the part, but he does anyway because you know its just so dang important to say all of what he's got to say and anyway they kind fuss with the natural evolution of the part in any case to get it all in (I mean where he starts "Remember that night you were already bed instead of (something somthing) drink with me instead"; it starts the first time in the song at 0:56?)! I love parts in songs like that, where you can tell they had to be just a little bit innovative to do what they want to do...

And this song is about being old, even though this band isn't old at all. I mean, I remember thinking that being 25 was old but I was totally wrong about that. Now I think being 35 means I am old. I'm looking forward to being 45 and thinking how wrong I was when I was a little pipsqueak 35 yr old. Also: this song makes me think about how much I love my wife.