"Hey, at least I don't sound like a hoarse Mickey Mouse and you can't really tell if I'm on key or not."
With enthusiastic testimony like that, it must mean another medium-popular 90s nth-wave punk band is releasing their vinyl/comp odds and ends! Which they are! They being Jawbreaker! And putting aside for a moment the usual collector-fleecing aspect of these anthologies (said obsessive having eBayed his way to a complete Jawbreaker discography, only to find the bulk reissued on fancy packaged disc anon), is it really necessary?
I have loved Jawbreaker. These days, I like them. It's different now, being not 16 anymore. My fondness can't extend beyond a bittersweetly-reminiscing-about-high-school-days-and-ex-girlfriends perspective. Hearing "Fireman" or "Ashtray Monument" still gets me all smiley, but the effect today is more than 50% memory-driven. Precious few bands can be certain that their released material holds up beyond the temporal context in which it was originally heard, much less the cutting room floor scraps and early demos. So unless you're writing a thesis paper on Blake Schwarzenbach's musical evolution, the majority of Etc should be of no interest.
Jawbreaker didn't even get certifiably great until five years after getting together. 1990's Unfun was cold; Bivouac was getting warmer. But it wasn't until 1993's indie classic 24 Hour Revenge Therapy that they really nailed it. As such, the first two-thirds of Etc are excruciating in every sense, as Jawbreaker reveals their younger selves as just another band with a stack of Fugazi records where their originality should be. The early, mostly demo material is above-average boom-chick punk (especially "Shield Your Eyes" and "Caroline"), explaining their rise above the other worshippers at the Church of MacKaye. But it also lets some absolutely dreadful moments out of the closet, like the five-minute-plus hardcore-influenced "Fantastic Planet" (aren't hardcore songs limited to two minutes by law?) and a U2/Misfits/Vapors medley worthy of a junior high power trio playing the local YMCA.
Alright, I'm being a little harsh; there are a few insightful moments of science-fair experimentalism-- the backwards loop at the end of "Gutless", the scary-voice suicide rant over "Split"-- that foretell the band's majestic peak, 24HRT's "Condition Oakland". But the vocal-cord-shredding emotion and one-dimensional arsenal (see how they Jawbreakerize, and thus ruin, REM's "Pretty Persuasion") gets old real fast. Unlistenability comes to a head on "Kiss the Bottle" where Schwarzenbach sounds like the frog in his throat has founded a large frog colony. "This was the last thing we recorded before Blake's throat surgery," the liners cheerfully intone.
After that painful glimpse at pharynx pathology, things start to brighten as the band gets a little more tuneful and a little more polished. Revenge Therapy and even Dear You outtakes fare better than their ancestors, and the band rolls through a Psychedelic Furs cover ("Into You Like a Train") with ease and aplomb. Penultimate track "Friendly Fire" even draws out a roadmap towards Jets to Brazil's Orange Rhyming Dictionary, as the tempo gets slower and the words get wordier. The album can't close without a reminder of its absolute inessentiality, however, which comes in the form of a pointless, no-alteration remake of the band's "hit", "Boxcar". "I think the major label defense budget spending was going to our heads," the notes tell us. (So why not charge us $15.99 for it?) And that's why, to paraphrase "Boxcar" itself, one-two-three-4.2 is the score.
