Album Of The Week: Pissed Jeans Honeys

Before I dug deep into Honeys, the new album from the feral Allentown scrape-rockers Pissed Jeans, I had this whole opening-paragraph riff planned about Sub Pop Records: How the label has gone through so many different permutations since its Sub Pop 100 days, how even the Postal Service/Shins era has nothing to do with its current roster, how nice it is that a few bands of fuzzed-out noisemakers remain. And it's true that Pissed Jeans do sound like they could've been one of the more fearsome bands in the label's early days, though truthfully they probably would've fit better on the considerably more sociopathic Amphetamine Reptile. But Pissed Jeans aren't part of some '90s noise-rock revival; that type of pigeonholing does them no justice whatsoever, and it's not this album's story. The story of Honeys is this: Band frontman Matt Korvette has made a hate-fuckingly brutal, painfully funny, sneakily artful monument to broke-white-guy stresses. It's squirmy and violent and seriously hard to shake. And he's chosen sludged-out post-hardcore as his venue to express this stuff, the same way Bernie Mac used stand-up comedy to work out some serious shit, or the way Todd Solondz uses the indie black-comedy format to explore some visceral human feeling. It's a stark and powerful piece of work, one that confronts you with parts of yourself that you might not like.