Discount - Crash Diagnostic

I originally wrote about this album in my old blog and presented it in a really squirrel-y, uncertain manner in which I was forgoing any attempt to convince the few readers I had to download it because it was such a radically different kind of music than I commonly waxed on. It seemed kind of pointless at the time, but in retrospect, I just should've tried harder. I mean, why not? What's there possibly to lose? Just for value of a persuasive writing exercise, maybe. This blog is probably a better home for it, but really, I'd recommend almost everyone I know to stockpile the majority of albums I reviewed and uploaded on my old blog, too. I mean, sure, the chances of anyone reading a blog like this liking half of ye olde blogg's contents are nil, but dammit if I don't wanna try to convince you to give them a chance. I mean, Fela Kuti was pretty punk rock, right? He stood up for his limited rights, and paid a few horrible prices for them too. If you're gonna harvest anything from the old blog, I strongly oh wait I never published that Fela Kuti review. Nevermind.

And that concludes the worst intro ever.

Discount was an amazing Florida pop-punk unit that released 3 full lengths and a slew of splits and EPs and is renown for being the only non-shitty musical entity Alison Mosshart has ever partook in. I really, really, don't like The Kills or the Dead Weather at all. I also don't use heroin, though, which may be a contributing factor. And by "renown", I kinda mean "in my opinion". After all, The Kills have approximately 50 times the amount of listeners on last.fm than Discount do. Oof. But anyway, Crash Diagnostic is the band's third full length, swan song, and an album I saturated so completely with nostalgia/sentiment late in high school I can barely listen to it anymore without getting foggy eyed.
If you've heard any of the band's preceding work, this album sounds like a mash-up between the exceedingly pretty, vocal driven pop-punk of Half Fiction and the more churning, dynamic sounds of early post-hardcore a la Fugazi. Prior to this album, Discount's sound could be traced to the family tree inhabited by East Bay pop-punk, J-Church, and Jawbreaker, but never sounding like an extension of any of those bands. Just pure, exhuberant, melodic punk music for young guys and gals to lose their shit to. On Crash Diagnostic, it sounds like they went out of their way to challenge convention and make their sound more conceptual. It kinda seems like a weird thing for a pop-punk band to do, but it's pulled off really well - not perfectly, as some of the songs embody one genre over the other, but even without perfect cohesion, every song on here is excellent. I know I'm making this album sound like a comparatively pretentious, self-conscious work compared to its predecessors, but there's a reason I chose this album for coverage over the others. Listen to "Broken To Blue", "Black And White Can't Capture Blue And Red", "Math Won't Miss You" (one of my favorite songs ever), "Harder To Tell", "Hit", and "Age Of Spitting". They might be less perfunctory than their older stuff, but all the energy's there. It sounds like a lot of care went into each of these songs.

I should reiterate, though - The Kills aren't bad just because of their lame retread on later Royal Trux's sound, but coming from a Discount-fanhood, it pains me to hear Mosshart's once vibrant, hooky, emotional vocals reduced to a dull, obnoxious slur. It's actually hard to believe they're the same person. Seriously, go on amazon.com and listen to some samples from any of their albums. I realize she was only like, 19 or 20 when this album was released and still finding a vocal niche that suited her, but man did things take a turn for the drawl.

http://www.mediafire.com/?dm2mon4t4yt

I'll be able to die happy if I get to see these guys reunite for a few shows, as unlikely as that seems. One more thought: the amount of assholes who comment derisively on how Alison looked circa Discount compared to how she looks now makes me want to punch a hole in the wall. I guess it's just a symptom of mainstream exposure, though.