It’s nearly impossible to decipher what Booji Boys singer Alex Mitchell is screaming most of the time. According to the five-piece Halifax band, their songs deal with “fun in the sun, the class war, and shameful fantasies.” Really, though, that’s beside the point. Lyrics aren’t necessarily a top priority when making a great punk album. What’s important is the energy, the barely-controlled noise, the sheer thrill of hearing someone validate your pent-up friction—and in this, Booji Boys excel. On Weekend Rocker, their second full-length, they continue to make music that burns as wildly as an overflowing ashtray at an erupting basement party.
The band, whose cited influences span ’70s punk and classic rock acts from Dead Boys to Creedence Clearwater Revival, have been grouped by some into a mostly Midwestern mini-genre dubbed Devo-core. That’s fair enough, given that their band name references an iconic character from Devo’s satirical new-wave mythology. In fact, though, the group’s origins in the tight-knit Halifax DIY scene among peers like Grump and Alienation have given them a sound that’s closer to brash hardcore with a catchy twist. “Most of the other bands we’ve been in have been straight-up hardcore or d-beat bands, so Booji Boys was our attempt at making pop songs, I guess,” ringleader Cody Googoo said of his initial bond with guitarist Steve Earle. Booji Boys’ self-titled debut, released in February 2017 on the UK punk label Drunken Sailor, had a lo-fi, distortion-drunk urgency, and their follow-up takes that intoxicating fuzz to another level.
Weekend Rocker opens with the title track, the album’s fastest and shortest. It’s not much of a song, but it’s a good preamble for the pure mania that’s about to go down. Only 18 minutes later do Booji Boys crash headfirst into their seven-minute closer, “Oh Yeah.” The song begins with a somber marching beat, then jumps off its hind legs. Earle’s riffs are lucid and tightly coiled, while the vocals sound alien, like Mitchell is drifting away on a cloud of nuclear fuzz. Where the previous 11 tracks stick with a single, gnarled mood, “Oh Yeah” is long enough to encompass at least four distinct feelings: depleted, rowdy, bacchanalian, and resolute.
At times, the fierce pop melodies of Weekend Rocker resemble the late garage icon Jay Reatard, though their sound is less crisp and piercing than his—the dense distortion that Booji Boys favor feels like suffocating in a humid mosh pit, rather than taking a kick to the head in one. Even so, Weekend Rocker’s upbeat spunk is one of its most appealing qualities. “Crowe’s Kitchen” is a propulsive two minutes of reverb-soaked psychedelia; “Locked Up in the City” is crusty ’80s rock verging on the Buzzcocks. “Sister” is a riff-heavy diamond in the rough, as is the curiously titled “Mr. Nazi’s on the Beat” (perhaps a warning about the predatory and corrupt powers of authority).
Although Booji Boys don’t sound much like the music that Devo made, they do mirror those Ohio weirdos’ strange, infectious energy. It’s a different strangeness than, say, performing in a crib alongside Neil Young, but the spirit remains more or less the same. Back in 1982, Mark Mothersbaugh whined the words “rock ‘n’ roll can never die” from behind an unsettling latex mask. It remains an apt unspoken motto for these unendingly loud Canadians.
