Descendents - Milo Goes To College

Time for another block on text on the internet! Yeah! So this is an incredibly obvious choice for a punk-centric blog revolving around my favorites or now and then, but hey, let me once again remind you (myself) that this blog's "followers" include two staff members out of three. Also one of them is me so I'm alerted when another staff member writes something. The first Descendents LP, Milo Goes To College, is considered a classic by pretty much everyone, cemented in the annals of musical history for furthering the developing of both pop punk and the melodic hardcore non-scene a few bounds, leaps, etc. Basically, the band took the speed of hardcore and melded it with some left-field pop sensibilities, packed it full of wonderfully melodic basslines, and developed the whole nerd-chic bands would pillage and forcibly conform to for years on end. Oh, and then the band members formed ALL at some point, who were super-saccharine, girl-crazy, nerd-pandering, garbage that took all the thematic elements of the Descendents and applied them to dull, generic, pop-punk.

I guess I could technically stop there without any repercussions. Those are usually all the things I cover in these reviews reduced to a single paragraph. BUT ANYWAY, this album is the 1982 followup to the ridiculously brief and comical Fat EP, and features 15 crucial tracks in something like 23 or 24 minutes. I don't remember. Either way, it was here that the band began to buckle down and write more focused, less nonsensical material - basically this is to Fat what Dirty Rotten LP is to Dealing With It! - all presented in a super energetic, not-quite-polished aggression with tons of memorable hooks, especially in the vocals and bass. Milo's lyrics are mostly a continuum of the angst/youth/girls triad found on the preceding EP, but now injected with lots of non-satirical misogyny and really naive-sounding sexism. Fortunately I discovered (and loved) this album a few years before any semblance of social awareness set in, because currently it's difficult to ignore such gross quips as "take a girl out, she won't fuck you, after you just bought her a gram of coke" and "the only fish I smell are on the deck of my boat". I guess they both might require some elaboration. Eh, just listen to the album and you'll get it. Pretty much every song is along the whimsical lines of "women are whores and cockteases", though.

http://www.mediafire.com/?flsgh0snt2z

I don't know if I made this sound like a worthwhile album, but it is. It's really incredibly good. The thing about the Descendents, though, is that they have a lot of really, really, really fucking awful songs, too. In fact, I made a list:

10.) Hurtin' Crue
9.) Parents
8.) No FB
7.) All-O-Gistics
6.) Van
5.) Enjoy
4.) Blast Off
3.) Sour Grapes
2.) Orgofart
1.) The Days Are Blood

They're in order of least-worst to worst-worst, by the way. And "Parents" is really catchy and has a great bass line, it's just incredibly stupid. Maybe I shouldn't have included it. After this album, though, the band got less and less good until they ended up with their good and bad songs completely distilled and polarized into either trait on the ALL album. Basically, if it's played in a pop-punk vein, it's good; if it's played in horrendous, sub-Black Flag style, it's... yeah, bad.