salon.com - The punk stops here

The punk stops here
Forget the slick mall-punk that rules the radio. If you like your music chaotic and bratty, you need to hear Times New Viking and Be Your Own Pet.

By Jess Harvell

Apr. 15, 2008 | Fans tend to think of indie rock as a reliable source for punky guitar-pop tunes, but how often is that actually the case? From the folkie spawn of early R.E.M., to the egghead electronic jams of '90s post-rock, to the ongoing vogue for neo-psychedelia, indie's just as often gone loose and spacey as short and jolting. Currently, the big names in indie are often the loosest, and the spaciest; indie webzines like Pitchfork routinely bestow their most coveted accolades on artists like the Animal Collective's Panda Bear, whose excellent 2007 album "Person Pitch" featured more bongo drums and wordless hippie chants than power chords. So where does a hard-up punk fan turn when it's hipper to sound like sprawling prog rock vets Yes than one-chord wonders the Adverts?

Not to the radio, though poppy punk bands certainly persist there -- an endless, interchangeable stream of shaggy gentlemen peddling the sound that made Green Day and Blink 182 multi-bazillionaires in the last decade, a sound that's been shorthanded as "mall-punk." Last year's biggest mall-punk band was undoubtedly Paramore, a quartet of barely legal Christians with hook-heavy hits delivered a tempo that suggested dangerous energy drink abuse. But if bands like Paramore and the sightly artier My Chemical Romance are mall-punk at its computer-enhanced best, most of the groups in this genre are more blandly competent than endearingly chaotic. Snotty but sterile, they come encased in a kind of all-over digital gloss that makes listening to a steady diet of the stuff as headache-inducing for many over-20s as consuming a double-glazed album by Disney tween pop superstar Hannah Montana.

So finding the kind of punk that errs on the side of rawness still requires a little digging. But it is possible to locate those sharp thrills buried under indie's recent spate of flaccid folk and go-nowhere noise, to find the kind of bands that restore some of the raggedness that's been pressed out of mall-punk. For instance: Ohio's Times New Viking and Kentucky's Be Your Own Pet, two bands united by unwieldy names, hometowns off the hipster radar and the fact that they've released two of this year's best punk records.