I used to have a regular gig reviewing album covers, so I can say with some confidence that D.O.A.'s fourth album possesses one of the greatest album covers ever printed. Look how terrified those rich jerks are, and how the crazy punkers are blowing their minds and smashing their dinners, while simultaneously quoting Durutti and Chagall and waking them up to the evils of capitalism! Silly rich people.
Existing fans of the fiercely leftist Vancouver band might have feared, looking at this cover, that the band was abandoning their hardcore punk roots in favor of goofy mass-market cheese metal in the vein of Twisted Sister/Quiet Riot. And based on the KCMU staff's reviews . . . well, they would have been right.
"Incredibly lame hard rock, complete with saxophone, synths, and harmonized guitar solos. Pointless and dreary cover of 'Singin' in the Rain,' which will probably be overplayed. The lyrics are still pretty good, and if the sappy commercialism helps them to reach people and actually make them think, I suppose it will have been worth it. Sigh.""Does longevity guarantee popularity? With the likes of Led Zeppelin & D.O.A. it sure does seem to. [When this was written the band had been around for less than a decade, so I'm not sure what inspired this comment, but in the end they did stick around to celebrate their 35th anniversary last year.] What a bland slab of shit."
"Not that bad, but overproduced."
"I've never liked them. So there! So..."
"Bleck!"
"Sammy Hagar would be green with envy over some of the guitar bits on this."
"Grow up." [Written in pen on the album cover itself. Irony!]
There's a lot to unpack here. There's the fact that despite my teenaged fondness for Black Flag, Rollins Band, and Pigface, I completely missed the existence of this project produced by Mr. Rollins, a key member of the first two bands, and Andrew Weiss, a key member of the latter two. There's the u…
If I were a better blogger, I would have gone into KEXP armed with the Bumbershoot lineup and found an album from one of the many fine bands playing at this weekend's festival (Negativland, say, or maybe Jonathan Richman) so as to bring you a remotely topical post for this week. Instead of that, I …
