The Cute Lepers
Can’t Stand Modern Music
(Blackheart, 2008)

The Cute Lepers can’t stand modern music. That much is obvious, both from the title of their album and the sounds contained therein. Their pastiche of early punk and power pop almost sounds like a joke, but the energy and attitude they pump into their music is no laughing matter. The tracks may have a familiar ring, but they pack a punch that’s both bracing and a bit nostalgic, depending on the age of the listener.

The band is from Seattle and two of the players, Steve E. Nix, who supplies snotty lead vocals and guitar, and bass player Stevie Kicks, were members of the Briefs, currently on hiatus and/or broken up, depending on which website you scope out. They obviously love first-wave punk and new wave. They’ve immersed themselves in the sounds of the ’70s, and while they haven’t quite managed to distill their influences into a sound of their own, their fierce attack and blistering energy makes Can’t Stand Modern Music a romp from start to finish.

“Terminal Boredom” opens the album with a riff-heavy screed that combines the rhythms of Eddie Cochran and the Clash. Clanging guitars, a driving girl-group handclap rhythm, and snarling vocals from Nix make the track sound like a lost classic from the late ’70s, an ironic slice of teenage alienation. They follow it with “Cool City”, a Buzzcocks-meets-the-Jam power-pop gem that benefits from the oohing and ahhing backing vocals of Duffy, Prisilla Ray, and Ami Zipperhead. “It’s Summertime, Baby” echoes the breakneck energy of Eddie and the Hot Rods, and when Nix sings that the band’s “on a mission now to deliver brighter days,” you believe him. The tune is a jittery blast of pure punk sunshine. “The News Is Always the Same” is a protest song with a clattering blues feel, almost an anti-folk protest song. It makes nihilism sound like big fun, and Ty Bailie’s piano adds a hint of honky tonk hillbilly rock to the track.

“So Screwed Up”, a Cars/Sex Pistols/NY Dolls/Stiff Records mash-up, delivers the band’s philosophy with thunderous panache. Nix delivers an incomprehensible vocal that’s nothing but attitude, while Actually lays out a meandering solo that compresses 30 years of punk/pop enthusiasm into a crisp, uplifting epiphany. The lyrics are merely the hook line “so screwed up” repeated endlessly until it loses all meaning and lifts a joyous middle finger to the adult world. It’s hard to tell if the nihilism the band is steeped in is a stance or a genuine disaffection with modern life and music, but they sound sincere and perfectly capture that NYC-glam-morphing-into-punk moment that made the American punk explosion so invigorating.

The album closes with two less derivative tunes that perhaps suggest what the sound of the band will be on the next album. “The Day After the End of the World” is a tongue-in-cheek celebration of the breakdown of society, waving goodbye to authority, repression, depression, and constraint with a thumping mid-tempo groove, a mad chorus carrying on in the background, and layers and layers of chaotic guitar noise. “Opening Up” tips its gob-stained hat at the new generation of punks that are rising up with a determination to make the world a better, brighter, freer world. It ends the album with its anthemic credo. At 25 minutes, the album is a bit short, but it’s easy to recycle it on an endless loop to keep you pogoing until the wee hours of dawn, as us older folks are wont to say.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

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