DRENGE

Change two letters and you get "Grunge"

Given that I’ve been listening to Agent Orange for over 20 years on a cassette tape a friend made while back in highschool, it was hard for me not to fucking love this trio of emo stoner skaters who I can only imagine have listened to a ton of Black Sabbath and religiously watched and rewatched the punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization. Or maybe they were just really into Nirvana 20 years too late when it became cool again. I don’t know. Even though their band name sucks, something just clicked. It is neither here nor there that they come from Sheffield, which to me is just some dismal burb in the UK and, culturally speaking, irrelevant. They probably don’t even skate, except that they probably do. In this Post-Interenet Age, the signifiers are all over the place. Who can tell anymore? But the music works, maybe even including all the gratuitous references to “blood”, dismemberment and other horror film fantasies lead singer and guitarist Eoin Loveless keeps singing about.

I’d call Loveless the frontman, except that he still looks like a teenager. If it was 1980, he’d probably have a rat-tail, but it’s not, so he has the same haircut without one. The drummer, his little brother Rory Loveless, is insanely good at belting out the hard, fast, precision beats of this nth generation punk, or as the Guardian calls it, post-grunge. One thing about punk that makes it different from noise, post-punk, most indie rock and all those genres that came later is that it needs a real driving beat to keep the kids moshing. Rory has it down. He is the fucking driver of the train that is this band. Eoin meanwhile makes me think he’s singing for the best goddam band in his high school, and these guys are going to be awesome five years from now, if they’re not dead by then. They’re already good now, and he has a young, uncertain charisma, and if they keep going, who knows?

The Red Marquee crowd was by fits and spurts vibing off their energy. The song “I’m Going to Break You In Half” would probably start moshpits in most rock clubs, though that didn’t quite happen at four ‘oclock in the afternoon on the first day of Fuji Rock. But then a few minutes later in a “slow one”, “Fuckabout”, a moshpit sort of ironic broke out and crowd was getting weird and Eoin Loveless could barely hold a straight face to sing the lyrics. After that they played, “We Can Do What We Want,” a song that shows that they are still young and earnest and punk enough to scream such a phrase, as if they mean it, and to do it over and over again. Be sure and catch them before they get too jaded to believe in such puerile emotional statements anymore. Right now it still comes straight from their blood-obsessed, messed up heart. If you’re an old punker or a young punker, that’s something to get into.