Customer Reviews

Post Mersh 1

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Like another reviewer here, I caught the Minutemen's whirl-a-gig jazz at a young age, but unlike him it's settled in nicely in my memory. The Minutemen opened me to Coltrane and Ornette, and the elliptical artistic attack of Boon, Watt, and Hurley continues to explode good sense as far as I'm concerned. They're at their most elegant here, finishing off practically every song under two minutes. Favorite lyric: "Pack a chunk of the sun/Glue it to your heart hold on." If you happen to have money to splurge, you could buy both of these albums separately: they were released a little more than a year apart, and while "The Punch Line" forms the musical foundation for everything to follow, "What Makes A Man Start Fires?" is thick, rich and strange enough to demand its own hearing. D. Boon's ghost might say, "Go econo."

The Minutemen were one of the best bands ever, and I don't normally say that kind of thing. They had fire, funk, swing, intelligence, wit, soul and a killer rhythm section. "The Punch Line", their first album, included on this disc, contains about 20 songs in thirty minutes. (They weren't called the Minutemen just to get up the noses of right-wingers.) They had more good riffs and great grooves per album than most bands can fit into an entire career.

This is one of the three or four essential Minutemen discs, cramming their first two albums onto one sliver of plastic. Once heard, they are never forgotten and never regretted. The only bad thing about them is that one of them got killed, and the band stopped; otherwise they might have gone on to change the face of American music forever.

Buy this album, and you will feel your standards raise even as you listen. As time went on, they mellowed, just slightly, and they slowed down a bit, and they let songs go on a bit longer than a minute and a half, but they never lost their touch. Hear them here in their blazing early style and thank the likes of me for introducing you to them.

I still get this one out from time to time, and with pleasure. One of the all-time great punk records--funny, angry, fast, cynical, blunt, funny, extremely well-crafted, anti-boring, and funny some more. I saw these guys once at 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis--D. Boone before he died, Mike Watt (in full Fidel Catro regalia), and drummer George Hurley (stupendously good that night). Post-Mersh V.1 perfectly captures the spirit and music of that terrific show. Warning: this is horrible study music--you won't be able to sit still. But you already know that--it's the Minutemen!

I'll always love the cover painting on Punch Line. One of the great advantages of albums/12"s/lps or CD's: simply the size of the jacket that gave you much greater visual feasts when they had 'em and that was one.

If you don't already own these on album (heck, I own both and I still got this baby) get this thing and the other two Post Mersh volumes. All three were released in 1988 with music from 1980 through 1985.

Just listen to their music. You will never hear another band that sounds like them. (There's that excellent tribute CD Our Band Could Be Your Life). We were just lucky that three guys got together in San Pedro and made this music. It blew us away then. Though, I gotta admit, I didn't think it was Hardcore enough to go see them live as often as I coulda. Ya wimp (that'd be me). Only later, maybe near the end in 1985 did I start to realize how amazing these guys were. Each time I saw them live, about once in 1983 and two times in 1984 and maybe once in 1985, they just blew my head off. They definitely needed to release a live lp. Fortunately, there's that DVD documentary comin' out soon. Corndogs if I'm not mistaken. Saw the premier of that at the cool old theatre in San Pedro. Buffo. No question. There's gonna be at least one full live set on that DVD, hopefully more.

This was one of those bands that ruled in the studio and live. Not all bands can do that. These guys did. And death from a car crash (R.I.P. d. boon) is all that kept them from ruling the musical world for decades to come. One can only imagine what music they would have created and gifted us with. Only imagine. chrisbct@hotmail.com

The best way to get started as a new listener to the MINUTEMEN is this one. It features some of the earliest, best, and not to mention shortest songs they did. This is also a good way to buy both albums (available separately) on one disc. Also check out Post-mersh Volumes 2 & 3.

"The Punch Line" scares me. I've never since heard music that intense or pointedly aggressive. The band's more ambitious tendancies are to the fore as well - these are men who had "Trout Mask Replica" in their collection along with a lot of other things. The lyrics are pretty good too. Quite a record.

"What Makes A Man Start Fires" impresses me less - the lyrics move towards nihilism and the music is suitably ugly.

This CD is a compilation of the Minutemen's first two 1980s LPs on the SST label. There was no doubt in my mind about the genius of Mike Watt, D. Boone, and George Hurley at the time this music was released. In 1981, no one in the music world was blending leftist political song lyrics with ultra-short jazz-punk song stylings like these guys. In addition, the Minutemen were wonderful bearers of a post-Vietnam/anti-Cold War revolutionary spirit. Their songs seemed to stand for justice, equality, honesty, and peace for all. And they wrote about these topics in a very unique, obscure way. Each song was like a little puzzle to figure out. "Son of a martyr, son of father/You can look inside you, you can look inside me." What the heck was Mike Watt talking about there? I don't know, but it was fun trying to figure out. Like the Dead Kennedys, the Minutemen were a political/metaphysical education to my fifteen year old mind. However, upon listening to this music in 2001, I now have the sense that it sounds "trite" and "above reality." It has hard to put my finger on why this is; perhaps it's because I have gotten older and more discriminating in my tastes; perhaps it's because I've become conditioned to better music production techniques over the last twenty years. But whatever the case, I just feel annoyed when I listen to these CDs today. They sound amphetamine-fueled, screechy, and grating to me. All in all, I think if you have not heard the Minutemen, "What Makes a Man Start Fires?" and "the punch line" are the place to start. However, keep in mind the context that this music was written and I think it will sound and play better.