Pissed Jeans - Shallow [Reissue]

One of the essential keys to Pissed Jeans’ success is that, quite clearly, they do not take themselves too seriously. This allows them to play around with their punk, giving them license to career off into loping, screeching noise jams (“Wachovia”), write two-minute garage-rock vignettes with names like “Ashamed of My Cum” and, of course, call themselves Pissed Jeans. Yet this four-piece are more than an extended fratty in-joke set to music.

Firstly, you have to consider the riffs. In between peals of feedback and the Black Francis-esque howls of singer Matt Korvette, the band constantly gather themselves around cyclical, chugging motifs that lodge themselves into your ears and refuse to budge. The bassline on “I Broke My Own Heart”, the enormous chorus of “Closet Marine”; everywhere you turn on Shallow, Pissed Jeans slap you in the face with a fantastic riff.

Then, we have the rhythm section. The bass and drums hear sound massive, perfectly suited to the sparse, frill-less production, which allows them to breathe. While never sounding “virtuosic” in any traditional sense, Pissed Jeans do have a certain undeniable power, and this is mostly thanks to the solidity of Sean McGuinness and Randy Huth.

It’s easy to understand why this album went out of print, and even easier to understand why now is the perfect time for its reissue. Due to its crassness and indifference to fashion, a record like this is pretty difficult to market to all but the most avid devotees of Sub Pop and American punk. Yet since bands like Yuck, Metz and Cheatahs made ‘90s alt-rock fashionable again, people have started paying attention to Sub Pop again. So what better time to re-release this excellent debut from the most Sub Pop of Sub Pop bands?