Yank Crime

Inte för mig

Exactly the album I needed for shouting at a driver who pulled out in front of me without looking this morning

This slaps actually

4/5. One of the best post-hardcore records of the 90’s. It doesn’t waste any time either as it comes out swinging with “Here Come the Rome Plows” with its pummeling and loud guitar riffs. And from there every song hits so hard and they all take so many interesting twists and turns like on the long “Sinews” which starts out slow but then goes all out in its final few minutes. Discussion of 90’s post-hardcore often gets shortened down to just being about Fugazi and Unwound but I fully believe this record should be in that conversation too.

I tried to listen to this album about five times, succeeded three of those times, and with each subsequent listen there were diminishing returns. By the time I got to "New Intro" I consistently hoped the album was over. Not horrible, but not the 4+ I wanted to round up to at some point. 3/5

why is he so angry?????

I couldn't do it. Too hard on the ears.

Pure aggression that nearly managed to get me headbanging. Of course it sounds like a bunch of teenagers in a garage, but at least they got the right idea.

Really enjoyed this one. Quite the journey through a bunch of sounds, going from hardcore into some post rock areas. With some noise chucked in there. But it all worked for me.

Guess I’m emo now cos this was great.

Not terrible. Loud angry music in the 90's is much better than than post punk crap in the 80's. At least it's listenable.

This is the type of stuff i signed up for. Its great.

I thought it was a solid album, heavy rock, maybe early metal. The playlist it generated afterwards was solid too.

Meh, lots of noise, not a lot of substance.

Intelligent, controlled thrashing on the corner of math rock street and post-hardcore avenue.

2.5
This kind of dragged for me, and I found a lot of the songs really blended together

This was alright. I'm not the biggest hardcore, but I did enjoy a lot of the structure of these tracks. Math rock sounding kind of post-hardcore whatever you want to call it. I can dig it.

Didn't love the vocalist. I would've enjoyed these more if they were just instrumental. The best tracks were those largely without vocals... I was honestly a bit disappointed whenever the dude started belting out lines.

I loved Rocket From The Crypt and was delighted to get this other work from john Reiss.

It is flat out garage noise with vocals that are little more than a squark, but i really enjoyed it!

I could have done without the first 20 seconds of ‘Super Unison’ but i really enjoyed the contrast that occurs throughout this song as it blend ms into something more reflective.

The more laid back side is carried into ‘New Intro’ a more relaxed instrumental that has me worrying that the energy of the earlier album has gone but ‘new math’ quickly allays that fear.

Strangely my main issue with this album is that the tracks felt too long at times. The style suits something a bit punchier and shorter

A band that, given the music I was into in the 90s, you'd think I'd have heard a lot of, but I've never really listened to Drive Like Jehu before. This despite being aware of them because of a deep love of Rocket From The Crypt (John Reis, guitarist of DLJ, became Speedo, guitarist and singer in RFTC).

I enjoyed this a lot, but because the guitar was so reminiscent of RFTC in places, I found myself wishing John Reis was singing rather than Rick Froberg. That's not to say he was bad at all, and his screamy vocals worked great with the guitars, but I just love the vocals in RFTC.

I will say that they needed to learn brevity. Luau as the worst offender is far far far far too long, which coupled with the screamy siren sound you hear the moment it ends and Super Unison starts, was A LOT. But generally I'd have enjoyed everything were each track nearer 4 minutes than 8.

Discovering than one of the band now owns a donut shop where many of the flavours are named after bands (X-ray Speculoos!) was deeply enjoyable.

I spent ages trying to decide on a score. I really liked the sound, but the length of some tracks was such a deal breaker for me because there wasn't enough movement of sound to justify 9 minute songs. Just know that in my heart, this score has a 0.5 added to it:

3/5

This is a really special record, but I'm not gonna lie, it demands a little work from the listener. This is genealogically an emo album, but it has a lot of post-hardcore, noise rock, and some proto-mathcore too. For the uninitiated, Yank Crime was Drive Like Jehu's second and last album, and it is an emo album in kind of the "DC Emotional Hardcore/Screamo" sense, although the kind of sour melody construction here, some of the guitar work, and the ultra-emotive vocals are definitely recognizable as more familiar emo on some level. Although Yank Crime burns way nastier than the midwest emo of the time, or the pop-punk stuff from the 2000s. But, even compared to the rest of the sound they kind of slot into, Drive Like Jehu's Yank Crime is kind of it's own beast, and I think some of it is that they play this album almost like a noise rock record, just through their performances and soundscapes. But regardless of how it happened, Yank Crime is kind of a legendary, untouchable classic for a lot of people, and it was *really* influential to a laundry list of incredibly cool bands. I've listened to this a good couple of times in my life, and every time I like it more. Honestly, the very first time I checked it out, I barely even understood what they were doing. Yank Crime is a dense enough record that I honestly think it's almost impossible to appreciate on first listen, in a way that reminds me of an album like Jane Doe by Converge. It's a combination of the sprawling song structures, skronky riffs, and the chaotic sound. But once it "unlocks", you can't really go back. I've listened to this like three times today, and it *actually*, *honestly* gets better every time. At this point, I basically think that every discrete song is pretty much a self-contained masterpiece of intensity and precision. They were just operating on a nearly *unattainable* level of consistency, creativity, and construction here. And once you start peeling back the layers of difficulty here, you really start to see just how much melody and dynamics are baked into their sound. Eventually you realize that this is *really* catchy stuff. Even mangled barnburners like Here Come The Rome Plows and Golden Brown. As odd as it sounds, I actually think think that the longer songs here are kind of the way in for newcomers. Stuff like Luau, Do You Compute, and Sinews stretch the sound out a little, and even if the components aren't really easier to listen to, they bring the dynamics of this album forward, and give you just a little breathing room that kind of serves as the doorway to figuring out what the hell is going on with this thing (note that I have excluded Super Unison, because, while it's one of the better songs here, with some of the best passages on the entire project, it *does* begin with 28, uninterrupted seconds of excruciating, genuinely piercing feedback that *will* scare people off, if only due to the physical pain it can cause if you aren't expecting it). This is one of the albums here that I *really* implore you give a few listens. It's also an album where, if you don't like it, I probably can't convince you that it's actually a jawdropping masterpiece of the genre. It's something where I think you need to choose to embark on the journey the album sets forth, and it really forces you to come to your own conclusions. *But*, if you *do* decide to go on that journey, and if it *does* grow on you, I genuinely think that Yank Crime is one of the most rewarding albums in the entire lineage of punk music.