Do you remember the 90s? When you went to skate with your friends on Wednesday afternoons instead of working your lessons? When you shot the meager nest egg of your pocket money in the VHS Alien Workshop. That your heroes were called Andrew Reynolds, Danny Way and Rodney Mullen was your one and only God. That you were buying your baggy from Goéland and the pockets were warped and greasy from the wax loaves that smelled like cheap coconut. The music obviously punctuated these green years, now very distant. And in the mix tapes of the time, the magnetic tapes, recorded excessively, spit out hardcore punk, not the vulgar skatecore of the 2000s, no, good, real, which smelled of the sweat of a past afternoon to go flat under a dodger, sprained ankles and the wood of a broken board during a badly replanted pop shove-it. We could hear among others Lagwagon, New Bomb Turks, Zeke, Terror Bombs, No Use For A Name, NOFX and all the wonderful bands from Epitaph or Fat Wreck.
With Excess Subconscious , 3rd album of LMI (for Lazy Middle-Class Intellectuals), you are plunged back into this now outdated era. But beware, no confusion, the hardcore punk distilled by this trio from Pennsylvania is not that of yet another “already seen and over-reviewed, thank you, I can’t take it anymore”. Because LMI is clearly not lacking in modernity and carries a style, a priori simplistic and minimalist, in new spheres, more noisy, more progressive (yes yes, I did write “progressive”, even if it means being hated by some elitist lunatics) with gimmicks (changes of rhythms, tones and other convoluted structures) which remind us pleasantly of Sonic Youth (“Ghost Teeth”), others more imbued with a Nirvanesque spirit (the intro of “Light Demise”) or even Stoner on steroids (“Tracing Fortune”).
Voice side, it’s surly, it screams, it vociferates. We feel that the song is not there to laugh and to count favor with the listener. It’s hard not to make the connection with Trash Talk’s Lee Spielman. The alliteration takes place, we are in the middle of the pleasant aggressive. But we are also surprised with more serious parts bordering on growl (“Another Shadow”), others, more rare, clear enchant, perfectly fair and, my faith, with a nice grain of voice that deserves to be more exploited (“Ghosts Teeth”). All these alternations, complementary, do the job wonderfully and skillfully break the usual linearity of the style even if we would have liked them to be even more pronounced. The guitars, based on an infallible bass, alternate melodic but angry leads and uninhibited riffs.
The mix (expertly led by Dave Downham) is clean, full, filled with breaths and air. The bass is well rounded and very present (yum yum) and the guitars feel the saturation of AOC amps which are embellished with delicious chorus tips (“Tomorrow Midnight”), the drums far from the traditional basic poum-tchack is not lacking in originality in the game while maintaining a humility in the approach; inventive: yes, demonstrative: no!
After augmented humans, augmented reality, the increased cost of living, LMI offers you with Excess Subconscious augmented punk, a modern if not modernized version of what was best in the genre during the 90s. these 22 minutes which pass very quickly, the album is (obviously) short but this merry inventive and devilishly structured mess is well worth our attention.
With that, I put on my baggy and I go to retrieve my skate from the cellar. ‘I just have to find batteries for my walkman.
We like: punk-hardcore a priori traditional but a posteriori hyper modern and rich, the alternation of styles in the lines of songs.
We don’t like: a slightly short album, the alternation of styles in the song lines which could have been even more extensive.
[translated from French]
