Description

Black vinyl with lyric insert

If you’re anything like me you miss the good old days of punk rock. From the late `70s to the early `80s when punk bands played with raw emotion and energy. Most of the current punk bands bore me out of my mind. Every so often, though, a band comes around that brings glimmers of the past and infuses them with originality and that raw energy and emotion. The Starvation from Los Angeles was found in the mid 90s and they are one of those bands that achieve this. They started like a straight-forward “modern” punk band and just got better with age when they managed to craft a unique and extremely compelling sound. It’s hard to sound so lush, spare, and desperate at the same time—to be transfixed with the fungus and peeling lead paint of everyday living while still staring up into the atmosphere, hoping there’s something sublime, maybe even conciliatory, in all of the madness. Or maybe it’s just madness. For lack of a better lexicon, The Starvations are roots music how I imagine it to be, not how it usually is—full of purple, hokey Americana aching to be a toothpaste commercial. The Starvations playing seems to come from hearts as fiery as the first swigs of uncapped whiskey, yet as broken as bottom shelf liquor bottles at the end of a rough night. I imagine the band akin to an impossibly well-stocked jukebox that plays only the dead-on, heart to ear to wet eyes tracks. With these two tracks, there’s an accordion front and center, and it’s the furthest thing from a Pogues rip or faux jig. It helps congeal the sound, like the pumping of another organic instrument, as natural as sadness and remorse or the melancholy that comes from fleetly remembering, then forgetting, a good time. This is the real deal.

Track list:
1. One Way To Remind
2. Give Me The Keys