Athens quartet We Versus the Shark owes an obvious debt to Fugazi. But to understand the origins of their whirring melodic arithmetic, spastic disco-punk, and art-damaged pop, it's more helpful to examine three bands who took Ian McKaye's post-punk vision in a new direction-- Dismemberment Plan, Q and Not U, and Les Savy Fav-- at their respective turning points. These can be located between Les Savy Fav's 1999 album The Cat and the Cobra and their 2000 EP Emor; between Q and Not U's 2000 album No Kill Beep Beep and 2002's Different Damage; and between Dismemberment Plan's 1997 album Is Terrified and 1999's Emergency and I.
In each case, the departure involved a paring away of excesses. Les Savy Fav lost a guitarist, Q and Not U lost a bassist, and Dismemberment Plan lost all their inhibitions about what you could do in the context of a punk rock song. Each began to rely less on hardcore conventions, more on textural minimalism and innovative structures. Each began to plumb disco and new wave for their kinetic exhortations, essentially becoming experimental pop bands while maintaining their post-punk foundations. In doing so, each produced a record so far ahead of its predecessor that it seemed a step on the evolutionary ladder had been bypassed.
It's this ghost interim that We Versus the Shark, a temporally displaced missing link, occupies. With three singers, two guitarists, and a rhythm section that doesn't live up to the otherworldly precision of the Plan but is nevertheless solid and promising, We Versus the Shark has turned out a nervous, twitchy, hooky, disjointed dance-punk rave-up. It's too bad the term "angular" has been abused into meaninglessness, since the Shark's guitar attack really is all knees and elbows and sharp corners. Ruin Everything! is a flurry of sparkling detail and fragmentary hooks that somehow accrue into cohesive songs.
From the splintering, streamlined funk and hoarse exhortations of "You Don't Have to Kick It", to the syncopated percussion and clustered freak-outs of the chameleonic "Ten Uh Clock Heart Uh Tack", to the side winding, snake charming shimmy of "This Graceless Planet", this record refuses to hold still long enough to draw a bead on it. "I am at the Mercy of an Ambulance Driver" combines the quirky vocal fillips Q and Not U deployed with such success on "Soft Pyramids" with the paradoxically inert yet gliding micro-disco of the best Dismemberment Plan songs.
Ruin Everything! augers a more "mature" record in We Versus the Shark's future, but as is, it's perfect for blowing up basements rather than packing mid-sized venues. While I'm sure we'll applaud their more polished efforts, we'll also miss the unfettered energy of their debut, the same way you sometimes pine for the rawness of The Cat and the Cobra or Is Terrified while enjoying Go Forth or Change.
