Andrew Jackson Jihad
Candy Cigarettes & Cap Guns

THE REVIEW

How can I rationally explain the hours spent cursing and sweating over a guitar chasing that kind of frenzied flamenco-esque finger strumming? Impossible. All I can offer is a modest tribute hammered out with eaten and burnt fingers, and I think I've worn out several tendons.

In addition to torturing himself while torturing the strings, Sean Bonnette offends, screams, yells, coughs, barks and in his spare time skates - sometimes even wearing a Morrissey t-shirt, which is never an insignificant detail - and the Andrew Jackson Jihad, who here on their first LP - nearly ten years ago, already - were a skeletal trio of guitar-upright bass-drums, played and still play folk punk. But not folk punk in the Italian sense of festivals and partisan guerrilla warfare that we better leave alone; in the sense that they play acoustic but with the punk attitude of the filthiest punk - like some episodes of the Violent Femmes, to be clear - although more than anarchic, committed nihilism, we're talking about straight-in-your-face existentialism, without Morrissey's pomp, class, and ostentatious culture; rather, Bonnette's is the existential pessimism of a street preacher prophet committed to misanthropic profanity with peaks of blasphemy, delusion, and semi-gratuitous hate frenzy. With a sharp and pleasant tone but always nervous and often on the verge of shrill, of rough and postmodern culture, but brilliant and at times evidently genius.

As God Made says, among other things: heaven is a special place in hell where you can watch the people you hate get hurt, that is, more or less that paradise is a special place in hell from where you can see inflicted sufferings on those you hate. That would be enough. But I Love You is a love song that's not at all, because no love song talks about laughing at the retarded, throwing stones at dogs (to hurt them), and in no love song do syphilis, gonorrhea, and crystal meth appear; on the other hand, the one who says I is not Sean Bonnette, but one of those many who believe they can hide any baseness behind a finger of love and good feelings; something that reminds me of the sensitivity of Giusva Fioravanti according to Francesca Mambro. On the other hand, in Bonnette's picture, every person is filthy inside and out, and if Woody Guthrie's machine killed fascists, his throws bombs randomly at the crowd: from Scenesters, the characters of the various scenes come out badly, the omnipresent caricatures of the various faunas, genres, and subgenres, which are everywhere and dress like the things they listened to before you, and they are true. Lady Killer is an exercise in impromptu catchy misogyny. Cigarettes says smoking kills you but also makes you cool, but only if you smoke Parliament, and I never understood why; in Most Aborted Father, the cigarette is a man suffocating to death, his head is on fire, and someone is sucking the nicotine out of him. Fuck White People is an old-school hardcore played acoustically, containing hate for the whining whites who call the cops, and in Phoenix of Andrew Jackson Jihad, yesterday, this happened this. Be Afraid Of Jesus is about cutting a piece off Baby Jesus in a dream, but the piece you cut off keeps bleeding while you are condemned to hell and eternal suffering, and Bonnette yells at you that you must fear Jesus. Daddy didn't Love Me is a hyperbole on the conflictual relationship with father figures, one of Bonnette's favorite and frequented themes, and adds pedophilia to the filth. You Don't Want to Fuck With Me, the title is enough.

With emotional interpretations, extremely tense, in rage trance, Sean Bonnette manages to desecrate, to be worse than politically incorrect without ever sliding into the nonsensical or childish, and on the first album, his poetics were already perfectly traced, although missing, here, the topòi that will definitively characterize them - see People and People II.

Andrew Jackson Jihad has released the best album of this year (two thousand fourteen)(that is, the best of those I have listened to), but it seemed right to start from here.