It's unfairly easy to play the crotchety, old-guard punk in an era when even The Offspring can manage to garner esteem for "keeping punk alive" merely by sucking for ten years running. "Everything's so goddamned obligatory!" cries the punk relic. "The sound, the look, the act-- time was, this whole thing used to be about standing apart, not blending in!" And it was, for about a day, until Richard Hell ostensibly wore a ripped t-shirt onstage and finally gave everyone a consensus-cool role model (if only 'cause most of them couldn't pull off the Dolls' drag, or Reed's arrogance). Sure, the great bands still beat a few divergent paths even if they all ended at the same idealistic destination, and to be fair, no one too far under 40 can know the exact feeling of starvation and heroin addiction in the Bowery circa 1973 or water-rationing in England, but neither did most of the bondage-clad horde back then, either. It's the nature of a trend: only a few people are allowed to drive-- the rest are along for the ride.
I realize that punk rock's own Trail of Tears is a long road to travel just for me to lead up to The Distillers (but here we are)-- doubly so because I'm about to ask you to disregard all of it. I only mention it because that specter of some sort of ideal or credibility is inescapable. Still, for all the talk of parallels between Hole/Nirvana and Brodie Dalle's Distillers/ex-husband Tim Armstrong's Rancid, all the willful categorization, all the thousand-times-old liberty spikes, chains, and piercings, The Distillers have created one hell of a rock album-- and it doesn't purport to be anything more.
Coral Fang impresses not just by some nebulous "punk" standards, but by the standards of just about anyone who wants to be rocked gently out of sleep by the dulcet tones of thrashing guitars, pogo-friendly love songs, and possibly the most compellingly forceful female punk vocals since Exene Cervenka wailed her way out of the nihilistic abyss that cartographers call "L.A." Here, technical ability takes a back seat to frantic blasts of distortion and mechanical percussion like a metronome powered by the Hoover Dam.
Though far from a three-chord wonder, Coral Fang doesn't fall far from a typically SoCal sound-- the chord changes aren't rocket science, but the rhythms are fast and the fills are rare, quick and poisonous. From the lonely start/stop build of "The Hunger", to the jackhammer assaults and beautifully harmonized choruses of "Coral Fang" or "Die on a Rope", the album's range is strictly textbook material, albeit with some uncommonly effective production. With surprising consistency, The Distillers come off like a cross between X at their most incomparably, beautifully raw and the greased-up melodies of an angry Rocket from the Crypt.
But this is really Brodie Dalle's show; her razor-cut cords are the bastard product of Mike Ness and Exene Cervenka, and from the sound of things, they could possibly go on to rule the world if sufficiently provoked. Anyone who lifted a hand to champion Karen O as some symbol of modern empowerment in rock music, take note, because Dalle is everything Karen isn't: an impassioned, powerful frontwoman, the legitimate heart of her band, and probably the most dominating female presence-at-large (read: receiving M2 rotation) in rock right now. Not that she has much competition, apart from O and maybe plastic surgery disaster Courtney Love, but if the field were increased tenfold, I'd still like her odds. She has a wearied depth and subtlety in her voice that lends genuine weight to what otherwise might seem merely passable punk anthems, and a charm and vulnerability that carries more conviction and authenticity than caricature-- which is an almost unspeakably rare trait for someone who opens her record shouting, "All my friends are murderers."
Dalle gives Coral Fang what may be best described as a sense of near-maturity. It's an earnest call among the crowd of would-be voices of youth in carefully controlled and marketed revolt, but also provides a hint of the adolescent sense that real revolt is a logical means to an end. It panders to that angst-ridden vibe somewhat, alternately flexing and wallowing, but it's ultimately forgivable; as long as a kid dreams of smashing the system while struggling to balance equations before homeroom, there'll be a need for this. The classically retarded, album-ending storm of outro chaos raises the sense of gratuity a little higher, but not as much as so, so many have in the past-- like Rancid, or Bad Religion, or even the Sex Pistols, say.
"Wait, what the hell are you doing coming back to 'punk rock?' Isn't this, like, not about that stuff?"
An astute question, friend (cue music for the sappy resolution, and fight back the tears, kids-- I'll keep the after-school special brief). I don't know, maybe the punk "ideal" of pure individualism passed rock by for bands like Liars, or for Kevin Drumm, or any number of other artists who are really unburdened by the need for critical or popular success, even if they sometimes get it. But if simply knowing Coral Fang rocks exceptionally hard isn't enough, I'll say this: die-hard "punk as fuck"-ers can (and likely will) easily find reason to cry themselves to sleep on their badass spiked-leather pillows, and The Distillers might not be able to spot a new idea with the Hubble, and no one will single-handedly save any faltering genre anytime soon, and even with that "punk" stigma looming large... Coral Fang is still a proud achievement.
