Throwing Stuff
Fit, Fine & Well
(TNSrecords)
When Johnny Rotten famously sang, “anger is an energy” in the PIL song, “Rise” he was speaking for a generation of disaffected youth. At its very core, punk rock is a genre that requires alienated energy; without that, it withers and dies. The best bands manage to ride that crest like a precariously balanced board on a dark wave.
Manchester band Throwing Stuff have managed to get on that wave and ride on a crest with the best of their contemporaries; but on Fit, Fine & Well they also dabble in the bigger conversation of canonical figures, like Rotten himself. This isn’t to say that the fledgling Mancunian band just penned another Never Mind The Bollocks but what is? Punk is defined by its core contention, making what lit the fuse thirty years ago passé. Bands like this need something new to make that spark, and that is clearly here.
Their latest of three records, Fit, Fine & Well contains fifteen tracks and each is infused with an explosive, heart on the sleeve energy played at a blistering pace. The band wastes no time, playing hard and fast with production that forces a confrontational quality to every track. They open with a blast on “Tracy Chapman” that is either a joke on the ubiquitous “Fast Car” or a desperate plea to get in and drive away, as the folk-rock singer continues to croon about on adult contemporary radio to this day. The band drops a little tongue-in-cheek humor throughout a few of their songs, but it is usually as an angle into talking about desperate situations. They’re political, “We Wrote This Song Before David Cameron Resigned” and principled, “We Are Only Healthy To The Extent That Our Ideas Are Humane” and fucking jilted, as evidenced on “How Do You Sleep At Night”. Each song is brisk, only “Steve’s Job” clocks in at more than two minutes; often, the title takes longer to read and digest than the song does to play. Speaking of the titles, I love how the band uses titles like “I Wish You Would Hibernate” and “Whatever Made You Think Paper Was Valuable” as part of the song’s overall dialog. At all turns, these guys are efficient in expressing an ocean of miasmic rage.
What keeps my back a step from full on love fest with Fit, Fine & Well is that the songs are a little underdeveloped. That’s a stylistic choice, I think, not necessarily a lack of range on the band’s part. I think my rage on these topics is a little more nuanced, more discussion than a shouting match. That said, if you need to roar, this is a refreshing nugget of nastiness that belongs on your shelf, like now.
