Minutes – Minutes
Kalamazoo, MI based punk rockers thunder into Album of the Year contention.
Seldom has a band been so appropriately named as Kalamazoo, Michigan’s own Minutes. They handily fit any definition or image you might care to conjure upon reading the word. Hastily scribbled notes taken at a meeting, aptly evocative of the ramshackle but utterly appropriate manner in which the band records. The astronomical measurement of right ascension – somewhat befitting of the band’s angular rhythmic foundations and aspirational lyrical content. Or the simple measurement of time; a sum of sixty seconds, bringing to mind the great pioneers of brevity throughout the history of punk rock. British art-rockers Wire’s incredible debut Pink Flag. The great San Pedro band The Minutemen, with their brutally concise political diatribes and stripped-to-the-core dynamics. The venomous screeds of fabled DC hardcore band Void, who for the longest time retained a recorded legacy which ran for just a few minutes.
It takes just a couple of minutes for the quartet to deliver a song which surely ranks as one of the most significant anthems of empowerment recorded in the 21st Century. Amidst the rampant guitar noise and the din of the sonorous rhythm section, guitarists Chafe Hensley and Ryan Nelson’s voices begin to strain above the musical clamour. As the band ride on the very edge of a scalpel-like riff, the twin guitarists recount the central premise of the song with the fervour of possessed men -“Do we ever know about the way it should actually be, we really should listen to ourselves”. As the rest of the band blast into the metallic cacophony of a guttural, borderline wordless chorus, Hensley begins to scream “we can fix it, we can fix it” over and over with a palpable sense of conviction. It’s the sort of earnest, impassioned punk rock which was prevalent throughout the nineties but seemed to die a death in the face of the style-over-substance revolution of the digital era.
Formed initially in 2008 and comprising four veterans of independent rock, Minutes have the sort of energy which you’d normally associate with idealistic, impetuous teenagers drunk on the simple pleasures of playing loud rock music. A terrific seven inch single from last year made nonsense of any perceived expectations. The liner notes gleefully espoused the spur of the moment recording process which was achieved with the help of a handful of friends, all of whom are individually named along with most of the equipment used. Furthermore, the band happily uploaded the resulting session onto the internet so people could download it from Bandcamp for free. On the blazing opener ‘I Was 19, You Were 20’, drummer and occasional guitarist Isaac Turner bellowed “we are still young, we are still here” with improbable gusto. For a debut album so steeped in the lore of independent music and pleasantly reminiscent of past greats such as Mission of Burma, Archers of Loaf or Vitreous Humor, Minutes has an embarrassment of incredible moments and terrific ideas of its own.
Minutes resemble many classic era Dischord bands from the nineties in terms of their sense of song-craft and approach, which is somewhat understandable considering guitarist Ryan Nelson played in a series of affiliated DC bands, including The Most Secret Method and Soccer Team. The interplay of two highly charged, alternately rhythmic or abrasive guitarists with a driving, post-punk rhythm section is a familiar one at face value but Minutes are less interested in achieving a clean sound and far more permissive in terms of harmonic hooks. Nelson and Turner alternate on the drums, with bassist Mark Larmee holding down the low end with aplomb. Once again, the band seems to take perverse pride in their low-fi recording aesthetics (the liner notes practically boast of tape hiss) but despite being literally concocted in a couple of basements, Minutes sounds fine. Although rough around the edges, the quartet are impressively tight and on-the-button throughout, exercising a suppleness which defies the aural grit of the recording.
As with most bands with several lyricists and songwriters, Minutes cover a lot of emotional territory on their debut album, ranging from the inspirational call to arms of ‘Peacetime’ – an extraordinary anthem which recalls 13 Songs era Fugazi with a much needed shot of humility – to the conflicted, heart-felt ‘Hey Nineteen’ – an excellent melodic rocker with a memorably insistent refrain. The frenetic, infectious ‘Float & Breathe’ could easily serve as a metaphor for the potential pitfalls of being in a rock band. Elsewhere, Nelson takes aim at the vanity of a luckless scribe on the biting ‘…and Friend’, matched only by Turner’s caustic tirade during ‘Smug’, seemingly aimed at a thoughtless, absentee parent. Comparatively, Hensley’s wide-eyed tale of youthful naivety ‘Sunday Not So Bloody’ is a shot of touching nostalgia amidst the trials and tribulations of his band-mates. On the gentle, reflective ‘Soldier Course of Record Spines’, Nelson seems crushed by the weight of the world, not to mention the considerable burden of his own record collection. The bludgeoning outro of the closing ‘Shakespeare’s Money Tree’ is a fiery conclusion to a surprisingly deft debut from one of North America’s most exciting bands. Just in time to amend those album of the year lists too.
Minutes – Minutes
2011 (Roydale)
Minutes at Bandcamp.
Roydale Records.
