THE BACKSTORY:
To those of you unaware of P22 and their sound I almost feel jealous. I’m jealous because you don’t live in a world where one day you woke up, listened to their debut EP Human Snake and thought to yourself “Oh shit, I like this. I actually fucking like this.” But here I am.
Their sound can best be described as a mix of Suicidal Tendencies on Valium and the last two minutes of ‘Heroin’ by The Velvet Underground. I know what you’re thinking, “But if they sound like that why aren’t they topping the charts and filling stadiums?” Well here lies the issue. It seems that the vast majority of the human race has had the audacity to evolve to a point where they find this sort of noise unlistenable. And it is to those people that I am jealous.
Fundamentally if you enjoy P22’s music you start to genuinely feel that you are in someway malfunctioning? Or perhaps devolving. Listening to Human Snake is what Charles Darwin would call ‘not very cash money’ in terms of ‘survival of the fittest’. But if being the ‘fittest’ means you shouldn’t think that P22 are one of the most intriguing punk bands coming out of America right now then you can put me on an island with the dodos and call me extinct.
KEY TRACK: The Manager’ – a perfect microcosm of their EP, this slow starting dreary cut quickly descends into chaos and is almost over before it began.
FOR FANS OF: Suicidal Tendencies, Black Flag, Metal Machine Music
