Even though there's a Bush in the White House and an oil-fuelled war in the Middle East, 1991 was a very different time-- especially for stateside fans of obscuro UK indie-rock. Cue grumpy-old man voice: Back then, you couldn't just download some unknown band's single from a blog for free, you had to fill out order forms-- by hand!-- and pray for weeks that the 7" arrived intact after your check was cashed. Back then, if you wanted to know what was happening in Britain, you had to wait for your local bookstore to get two-week-old copies of the NME. And back then, when you had 90 seconds to fill on a mixtape, you turned to bands like Boyracer: expedient, endearingly sloppy, and more lo-fi than a Dictaphone with dying batteries.
But "back then" is still very much "now" for Stewart Anderson's long-running, long-suffering noise-pop perennials. Load up Boyracer's new A Punch Up the Bracket and 2xCD Punker Than You Since '92 compilation on your Shuffle and you'd be hard pressed to say which tracks are from which year. Though the Leeds-bred Anderson now lives in Flagstaff, Arizona with his wife Jen (Boyracer's bassist since 2000), he still writes songs like a teenage Hüsker Dü and Wedding Present fan bouncing on his bed in a cramped council flat.
It could be a coincidence that A Punch Up the Bracket practically shares a title with The Libertines' first album; Boyracer's little corner of the world feels so hermetic, it's possible that Anderson is oblivious to the Brit tabloid-rockers. Whatever novel elements are introduced on Bracket-- schoolyard chants, skiffle gallops or, on rousing grand finale "Tactile", backward tape atmospherics-- are ultimately overwhelmed by the unvaryingly fuzzy presentation. But scrape away the grime on these 21 songs and you'll hear a band completely content with their lot in life. "Normal", a cover of a 1980 song by one-woman Brit-punk band The Petticoats, is a sarcastic plea for domesticity delivered with Poly Sterene-like scorn by Jen, while loungey lament "Perennial Underdog" contains a mantra that Anderson should chisel into his gravestone: "Time is what you make it".
As Punker Than You attests, Anderson's always thrashed away with one eye on the fretboard and the other on his watch. The collection packs 15 years and 75 freakin' songs (culled from every format imaginable, including 5" singles and flexidiscs) on two discs. Boyracer was actually inactive for five of those years, when the band fell apart after a bum deal with defunct New York indie Zero Hour in 1996. As Anderson was not able to locate the current owner of certain masters, the compilation features nine re-recordings of old songs-- not that there's any hint of modernization. Each disc covers a five-year era, 1991-96 and 2001-06. Tellingly, the latter period is presented on the first disc; as Anderson himself admits in the thorough liners, his earliest efforts "were a little cringeworthy and fey in places."
What's most remarkable about Punker Than You is the complete lack of contrived evolutions-- this is one pop band that never graduated to string sections, big-name producers, concept albums, or even simple Dolby noise-reduction. Evergreen 120-second standards from the band's Sarah Records tenure like "Doorframe", "Beautiful Lines", and "I've Got It And It's Not Worth Having" tell you everything you need to know. These tracks are a blinding barrage of buzz-saw punk racket, bloody-fingered acoustic strums, and heart-on-sleeve sincerity that could go over just as well in a Peel Session as on the Warped Tour second stage. Punker than You is an affectionately curated scrapbook documenting one man's persistence, and it has the charm of a zine: It's smudgy and unwieldy-- sometimes to the point of indecipherability-- but there's no denying the love that went into it.
