#half divorced

“Cling to a Poisoned Dream” and “Sixty-Two Thousand Dollars in Debt” are back to back and act like a pair. Both are fast and raucous and delivered with a truckload of bravado. Of course, this being a Pissed Jeans record, the bravado never lapses but the words strip it naked. The former’s title is a refrain, each hopeful qualifier immediately undercut by a reminder that the pursuit will, at best, make you sick, even if you manage to “keep [your] head down [and] swallow what’s left of your pride.” The latter gets more specific. While you’re clinging, make sure you’re paying things down – sure, you’ll inevitably “pass it on to [your] child,” but you can look forward to “someday [being only] sixty one thousand dollars in debt.” Maybe you’ll even smile once in a while!

Pissed Jeans are one of the few bands who can be described (with little fear of provoking a contemptuous eye roll) as “skewering” things. This applies to their treatment of personal near-ruin, as in “Sixty-Two Thousand…” and “...Poison Dream,” and, just as sharply, to the odious other — the people they’ve been unlucky enough to interact with. The apex of the form is, appropriately, “People Person” from Hope For Men, but Half Divorced’s “Helicopter Parent” is a worthy addition to their canon of oblivious and unpleasant characters. From the first line (“Oh you started getting bored, so you went and had a kid”), Korvette excoriates the psyche, the past, the present and future of his titular target over an ominous, feedback-riddled stomp laid down in unison by the rest of the band. By the last lines (“It's time to reflect and maybe contemplate respect instead of/micromanagement because it's just a generational dead-end”), he’s moved past annoyance to hit on something more fundamentally disturbing. It’s not only financial debt that one generation passes down to another, but their vapidities and hang-ups. It’s a dead-end; it’s a vicious cycle.

Like their Sub Pop label-mates in Mudhoney, Pissed Jeans back up their humor and disgust with hurtling, curdling sonic assaults – you can practically feel yourself shoved into a cloud of sweat and moshing bodies when the chorus hits on “Junktime.” But there’s often more than initially batters the ear. For all the sturm und drang on Half Divorced, the component parts of each song are well-differentiated and clean. You get a clear sense of both the individual performances and their interaction. For instance, on “Everywhere Is Bad,” we’re greeted by the thick slashes of Bradley Fry’s guitar, but never lose track of the tight, manic beat of Randall Huth’s bass as it scales the writhing jungle gym of sound, courtesy of Fry and drummer Sean McGuinness — delightfully, the latter takes a break from blasting elephant-caliber birdshot to bust a round, infectious solo. The call-and-response litany of dismissals, in four words or less, of everywhere from Mars (“could use some air”) to hell (“too many dudes”), are the highlight of the song, but the groove carved out by the band’s heavy agility makes the punchlines stick.

Pissed Jeans have always been able to make a personal grievance or mild hassle sound existential — see putting on a tight black shirt versus not bothering on “False Jesii Part 2” (King Of Jeans, 2009) — but with Half Divorced the desperation gets dialed up. When, on “(Stolen) Catalytic Converter,” Korvette says “I feel sick/but I can’t puke,” it seems right to extrapolate the almost absurd helplessness widely. The crass, humiliating and, worst of all, mundane depths of lives that aren’t quite falling apart are well-plumbed in the back catalog and that chronicle continues here, with vigor and feeling. Like the figure on its cover, Half Divorced stares down a smoking hole in the ground, the band hollering for everyone (someone, anyone!) to come look. “Too bad/we’re screwed.” At least we know it now.