Gob Squad – Watch The Cripple Dance

• 10th Mar 2008

Pop-punk is always an interesting proposition, the taking of something that was supposed to be subversive and attempting to make it ‘popular’. You take something that was supposed to undermine the mainstream and turn it into the mainstream itself. It is a similar journey hip-hop has made from turntables and boom boxes and square cuts of vinyl to Timbaland and Scott Storch’s cock-posturing at the top of the charts.

But then, arguably, how far from pop was Never Mind The Bollocks? How far from pop were the Abba-style riffs of ‘Pretty Vacant’? Where were we ever at with punk?

Gob Squad’s third album is most definitely punk, in the latter day interpretation of the word, that is, an interpretation informed by what happened to the term and aware of its limitations. This is not revolution music. The vocals skirt around tunefulness but don’t venture in; the guitars remain fuzzed or played high up the fret board. The bass lines are thin and follow the main chords closely; the drums snare and hit heavy with a ride cymbal adding pace where necessary. The references are to Metallica and to a slew of metal bands skirting with popular success. Bizarrely, ‘Stop Pretending’ could almost be Bush until the chorus drops and we are back to men with Sawn-Off Metallica T-shirts and a mattress for a bed, as Six By Seven would have it.

The album does show the work they’ve put in – it is ridiculously tight, and does veer through a range of types of punk, from the kind that might drag you through a Sunday morning dish washing session to the kind of thing that would work well on a dance floor at the Metro, while some old codger is spilling drink on you and the girls are on the other side of the room. Or is that just me? ‘Vacuum of My Own’ might be pertinent in that situation; here, it is a track that dares to even have a slightly proggy mid-section, and then leads onto the best part of the album, ‘Time To Be’, followed by ‘Reflection of Youth’. The vocals aren’t great on either, but the guitar work, the passion and the structure rise above the usual standard of this kind of fare. Whilst this isn’t punk breaking down the barriers and revolutionizing the world, and won’t convince the fey emo kids that their swooping string sections should be swapped for tremolo and power chords, they add something of note to a genre where it’s so easy to strap four chords together and shout very loudly.