Mclusky

I slept on Mclusky. I know; I suck. I knew who they were, and I could sing along with “Lightsaber Cocksucking Blues,” sure, but it was not until 2006 that I fully embraced the corpse of the finest, dumbest, loudest punk rock band of this pre-pubescent millennium. So everything I could tell you about Mclusky, or their fine retrospective Mcluskyism, is shit you already know. Like that this is the funniest goddamn band ever, and the humor doesn’t have punch lines that can grow old but comes from a genuine low-brow wit, one with a profane and hard-earned depth. Or that the “chorus” to “Alan is a Cowboy Killer” sounds like a plague of locusts looking to fuck, dissolving as quickly as they came back into the fuzzy thud of the verse. Or that “rope!” sounds like the Advantage playing the soundtrack to a malfunctioning Nintendo being eaten by Dead Rising. Or that “There Ain’t No Fool in Ferguson” is the lyrical equivalent to a Hieronymus Bosch painting. Or that Albini must’ve put a mic inside Stalin’s cage in Hell to get the frothing, carnal bass tone on “That Man Will Not Hang.” Or that “A-sides,” “B-sides” and “C-sides,” as the three discs of Mcluskyism are called, are irrelevant terms to a band that mixed like nitroglycerin, tequila and Truckzilla and were incapable of creating music that didn’t immediately set fire to its listener and devastate utterly the idea of ever forming a rock and roll band again. But you already know all this, right?