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Hard rock duos have always had it rough – filling up a room with sound can be damn difficult with only two men. Nonetheless, Austin angerfiends Damage Pants manage to do more than fill a garage with their rough-at-the-edges thrash rock. Combining post-hardcore vocals with more upbeat garage rock rhythms, this group’s self-titled vinyl debut release is abrasive enough to wear down senses and styluses alike.
Opening number “Empty or Not” begins with a slow building guitar that erupts into a strange time-signatured garage-metal riff. Hardcore screaming vocals cascade beneath a more in-your-face hoarse yelling that defies the melody of the song, a la the Minutemen; while this could normally be off-putting, the background yelling actually keeps the more loose vocals on top from feeling too lost.
On “The Hands of Paolo Rocco,” Kyle Smith switches out his guitar for some heavily over-driven bass while drummer and vocalist Robert Davis yells, “I plead the fifth” - which is good, because knowing too much of these two’s musical plans would destroy half of the fun. Smith’s bass-work runs all over, meandering and snarling as it goes. While not pretentiously busy, his playing is still far more active than one would expect from the genre. Ending with a very tight series of start-stops that leaves the listener tense before a collapse that never comes, this song gets it all right in just over two minutes.
Sliding into noisy guitar whining in “Van Mar Klaus”, Pants trudges through a sludgier side of its repertoire before a bluesy bridge breaks the mold and keeps the track from overloading. Damage Pants does well to follow the mold of Drive Like Jehu and Death From Above by emphasizing sound over vocals, and pulls it off to similar effect. “Ballad”, while having a main riff that could rip the guts out of a bodybuilder, suffers from the thin vocals that smatter the piece. While the music sounds like a rampaging bull, Davis comes off as the beast’s victim rather than its voice, and ends up running away screaming from his own song; some of Smith’s yelling to thicken up the singing would have turned the tide, but the song kills, regardless.
Occasionally, songs like “Sick of Static” change up the mood, hinting at a brighter though equally as bizarre side of Smith and Davis. Bright humming bass chimes over constant cymbal blasts, strongly evoking the earlier work of noise rockers Lightning Bolt, though perhaps with a more structured melody. While not nearly as masculine, the unusual vocal-free track is a perfect segue into side two.
“Brand New Guns” toes that line between wonderful and disturbing, as Smith/Davis team up to yell “Guns are fun/ and when we rob your house/ can we go to town?” While some may not vibe off the pretty-much-rapisty lyrics, the song is a good way to get pumped up (for what, I have no idea). “Gotta help myself to your good stuff/ gotta help myself”. The audience is more than tempted to do the same, going back for seconds to listen one more time. Likewise, the opening bass line of “Jump Ship” channels a sped up and less synthy “Hysteria” by Muse, and almost demands a fist pump or fifty. While this track has the most redundant and poorly executed lyrics on the album, its breakneck pace makes it too fun to stay mad at — definitely one to look out for at a live show.
Not everyone will like the atonal clash of sound that follows in the wake of Damage Pants, and even fewer will like their universally-derided name, but this band’s self-titled LP reintroduces Austin to a hard sound that has been sorely lacking in the past few years. On an album produced by Tia Carrera’s Jason Morales, intensity should be expected to take precedence over precision, and they do not disappoint. Aurally burning indie bands in their dreams, the sloppy, boisterous boys of Damage Pants have mastered the art of the musical Napoleon complex, and remain loud and cocksure despite the band’s size.
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