November 10 - 17 , 1 9 9 5

Teengenerate

Powerhouse Punk

by Carly Carioli

There's been plenty of post-rock to come out of Japan: from ear-splitting noise that makes the Boredoms seem listenable to teddy-bear punk by Shonen Knife and the lounge-hop stylings of Pizzicato 5. But it took until 1993 for Japan to produce, in the words of critic Hiroshi Sekigushi, "a great rock and roll band." Formerly known as American Soul Spiders, Teengenerate blow the lid off the American junk/punk-rock underground like something out of Jeff "Monoman" Conolly's most sopping-wet dreams - a garage-rock Godzilla bent on devouring whole and shitting out anew the primal soul of rock and roll.

Recorded live to four-track, Teengenerate's masterpiece, Get Action! (Crypt), comes after a crate of singles along the usual trash-rock label circuit, not to mention a CD recorded in mono on the Pop Llama subsidiary Cruddy ("Guaranteed to sound worse than vinyl!"). Get Action! doesn't play lo-fi as Sebadoh's pretend-you're-in-my-bedroom intimacy or Guided by Voices' AM-radio nostalgia. Instead, Teengenerate apply pyrotechnic dynamics and breakneck pacing to punk as the Ramones heard it - a bastard, simpleton take on R&B and early rock and roll (nowhere better stated than on the album's ripped version of "Shake, Rattle & Roll"), with some Boston punk thrown in. (Lead singer/guitarist Fink put together a DMZ tribute last year; the Nervous Eaters' "Just Head" shows up on the singles collection Smash Hits!, and Angry Samoans tunes have turned up in their live set.)

"Mess Me Up" leads off the 17-song, 33-minute Get Action!: introductory bent-string blur, a terrific smash of hyperspeed drums, fast walking-bass lines booming behind a double-edged guitar roar that rings tinny at the bottom and fuzzes out at the top, the whole mess underlaid with a white-heat, broken-glass drone that no one's playing. It's the sound of rules being broken, a ghost conjured by playing way too loud. The genius of Fink's hoarse shout is the way it flirts with comprehensibility without ever achieving it, sloughing off final syllables, plenty of a-a-a-a-rights and yeahs, his rant always recognizable but never coherent.

At a packed T.T. the Bear's all-ages show recently, Teengenerate's headlining set lasted almost as long as Get Action! Guitarist Fifi played up the Japanese Sex Pistols comparison with a gap-toothed sneer and jerky, dive-bomb slashes. Their performance also had a bit of the Elvis wanna-be from Jim Jarmusch's Mystery Train, an imitation embodied with such energetic devotion as to transcend simple reverence. But that kind of adoration is always disconcerting; it's as if they were demanding, "We're serious - how fucking serious are you?"