Dead Milkmen
Beelzebubba

THE REVIEW

It's nice to think that from the "hardcore" civilization not only fury and bitterness arose, but also amusing and improbable combinations, unthought-of revivals, miraculous alchemies, small multi-ethnic encyclopedias, satire, and madness. The Dickies, already at the end of the '70s, reminded us that the punk epic had begun in a way that was anything but angry and disgusted: the Ramones focused on humor, nonsense, the more escapist side of adolescence, the healthy and intelligent idiocy of American schoolboys. But those were different times, different music, hardcore didn't exist yet... shortly after came the Angry Samoans, but theirs was still an "old-school" style, with all the swagger that had already belonged to the Circle Jerks... then at a certain point Camper Van Beethoven started singing "Club Med Sucks" and hardcore discovered it could also be absurd. And here are the Vandals, the Dead Milkmen, and many other funny guys. Who were funny only to a certain extent, because the roots always remained hardcore, marked for life by bitterness, dismay, and above all, awareness... There would also be the Butthole Surfers, but confining the delirious trinity of Haynes/Leary/Coffey in the humble (albeit delightful) dish of absurd hardcore seems to me unfair and reductive.

Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), 1988. We're still there, in the golden decade of independent rock in the stars and stripes. "Beelzebubba" was the fourth album by this extravagant ensemble capable of mixing decades of folk traditions from everywhere into irresistible miniatures, playing any instrument, thereby approaching the most creative mosaics of bands like They Might Be Giants and Young Fresh Fellows (I apologize in advance for the horribly annoying list of obscure bands, but sometimes citationism is a necessary evil: these bands don't appear in standard encyclopedias because no one notices them, even though they've created songs a thousand times more catchy than much more celebrated bands, like Sonic Youth... mysteries of music criticism).
The cover is the first masterpiece of the record. The second is "Punk Rock Girl", one of the most unstoppable quadrilles ever to come out of a punk band's repertoire: offbeat rhythm, cheerful accordions, and Rodney Anonymous doing a Donald Duck impression. It's hard to navigate the multifaceted offering of the "milkmen," because each track is a reserve of extravagances and paradoxes.

The ethnic aromas emerge in the solemn serpentine of "Stuart" and especially in "Bran In The Flat", where hardcore lands on the shores of the Mediterranean and launches into a very tight tarantella, with mandolin strokes. On the purely revival front, the "graffiti" of "Bad Party" and "Bleach Boys" recall the magical '60s.
But the sun doesn’t always shine over Philadelphia. The smiling California of Camper Van Beethoven is far away, and the Milkmen remind us of this in the oppressive "Everybody's Got Nice Stuff But Me", where they dispense venom at will, while "Guitar Song" echoes the Meat Puppets, with its subdued, elegiac, bitter start, until the moment when the singing dissolves into a bitter sob, while an organ in the distance drapes the atmosphere with epic, making it the most heartfelt track of the collection.

Between the anxious tones of "I Walk The Thinnest Line" and the carefree ones of "Howard Beware", the Milkmen find time to resurrect the glorious Big Boys and their outgoing funk-core, with the exuberant trombones adorning "RC's Mom" and the burning tempo changes of "Smokin' Banana Peels", embellished by a tender dreamy interlude... And "I Against Osbourne" seems to have come out of one of the early Minutemen albums, so concise, angry, and unsettling it is. "Born To Love Volcanos", an elegant and frenetic folk-rock number, a pinnacle of elegance, reverie, vitality, lyricism, with precious infusions of strings and mandolin, capable of maintaining an incredible coherence despite numerous upheavals, is the definitive proof of this band's instrumental competence.

Closing this dazzling funfair of "American variety" is the anthem "Life Is Shit", sung in chorus, the ultimate synthesis of the life philosophy of a band that managed to redeem the nihilism of its generation with imagination and ingenuity.