“We played here about a year ago, we kicked ass, tonight’s gonna be no different” – that’s the promise Pissed Jeans frontman Matt Korvette gave to the audience at Brighton Music Hall as the band took the stage, opening the night for their Sub Pop label-mates Mudhoney in a stacked duo tour of heavy rock.
Nothing can really prepare one for their first listen to Pissed Jeans, but a glance at the cover of the band’s most recent effort, 2017’s Why Love Now, certainly won’t. It features a truly wholesome photo of the band nestled inside a soft pink backdrop with pastel accents – a stark contrast to even the very first song, ‘Waiting on My Horrible Warning’, which in less than fifteen seconds finds Korvette snarling at his most animalistic, singing “I was a boy, spending nights kickin’ life’s big behind”, separating behind into two distinct syllables, with -hind so warped and growling that it’s barely recognizable as human speech. But it is in its way a deeply human album; much of Why Love Now is spent in service of a critique of male fragility, nowhere more so than on the spoken-word interlude that bisects it, wherein author Lindsay Hunter delivers a stunningly naked look at a truly abominable specimen.
As one might expect for a band that, to some degree, made an album taking the piss out of themselves (all four members are men), Korvette in particular oozes with the type of sarcasm that one might expect from a band bearing the name Pissed Jeans. His brief interjections between songs are full of dry, deadpan humor, as well as one extended bit cajoling Mudhoney for allegedly trash-talking every Boston sports team in the green room.
Korvette’s onstage performance is a whirlwind, beginning the show by galloping from one end of the stage to the other as the band started into ‘She is Science Fiction’, and later on punching down like a one-man mosh pit. Twice he approached the edge of the stage, stood atop one of the monitor wedges, and dipped his microphone all the way down into the half-empty drinks people had left resting on the subwoofer. At one point guitarist Bradley Fry punched a water bottle from Korvette’s hand on cue without the singer even missing a beat, and despite the slippery floor continued his manic array of splits, gyrations, and crouches. It was to no one’s surprise that by the end of the night Korvette’s pants (jeans, of course) were split wide open, a fact which he took in stride, working in even more back-facing antics into his performance.
Korvette’s attitude is right at home with the music, full of grinding, punishing cuts like ‘Ignorecam’, which begins with the cry of a man who likes being ignored by women online, the churn of the song pausing for just one brief moment of calm as Korvette’s character says coyly, “it’s been five minutes – let’s make it ten.” The tidal wave of sound has a massive range of appeal, able to appeal to those who crave the sheer decibel levels of Swans or Melvins, the grungy and grimy sound of Mudhoney, or the traditional scathing punk messages of Black Flag.
As it’s been a couple of years since their latest, Pissed Jeans used their set to dive back deeper into their catalog, most often pulling from the wonderfully-named King of Jeans. Even back in 2009 when the album was released, the band were already looking, quite literally, at their fellow men for subject matter. Songs like ‘Human Upskirt’ portray seedy characters lost in a haze of alcohol and desperation – think something along the lines of Alex Cameron’s Forced Witness if he’d chosen heavy punk music instead of the smooth sounds of the 90s for a medium. “Human upskirt, what a freak – men are so complex!” shouts Korvette, and in a way he’s tying into what Pissed Jeans have always been about, right down to the name: Jeans, an icon of traditional masculinity and grit, soiled by their wearer’s own foibles.
Review and photos by Collin Heroux
