Polymer
(Dischord)
Produced by J. Robbins, worked on at Inner Ear, Bluetip’s Polymer continues down the Jawbox path, slicing off meaty hunks of stop/start guitar noise and cramming them right down the muscular rhythm section’s throat. Lyrically, main Bluetip man Jason Farrell combs the kind of upper-middle class suburban sensitive art-boy themes that Robbins often grabbed a hold of in the Jawbox heyday, when the trio was just stepping out of the shadow of great second-generation Dischord bands like Rites of Spring. “Don’t Punch Your Friend” counsels “Don’t punch your friend for being slow/that’s what work is for/no one wants to be/treated like an employee” and the narrator of “New Young Residents” confesses that he “Woke up afraid I may not be living up to my potential/I go to bed more afraid that maybe I am”. By the way, by comparing this quartet to Jawbox, I mean to pay them a compliment.
Bluetip is the kind of band that should be loved for their modest charms. All through the different periods of Dischord music, there have been bands that worked with a certain set of coordinates as Bluetip do now: solid, perhaps slightly derivative of what came immediately before them, but far better to be taking cues from DC folks than from, say, Hootie and the Blowfish. Bands like Dag Nasty, Ignition, Holy Rollers and Severin all occupied similar slots, and all were fine groups. None of them will be among the first names called off when the history of punk and post-punk explosions gets written, but certainly that’s not the issue. The issue is that ‘Polymer’ holds the kind of charms that come rising to the surface over multiple plays. The bash of the title track, the creeping undertow of “Anit-Bloom”, the echo of “Stereo Tinnitus”, all are worth sticking with until they are stuck in your head. And the package, per Bluetip’s usual razor-sharp graphical spew, is top-notch. In other words, both Dischord purists and regular folks, too, will find much to dig in Bluetip’s latest.
Stinkweeds, 2000
