Live: Steve Soto, X

When: 5/30
Where: Bowery Ballroom

So I have a small backlog of live reviews that never got published because things got so messed up this month. Here's the first:

Steve Soto and the Twisted Hearts appear to be a reasonable opener for X, Steve Soto himself having once been in not one but two of LA's finest punk bands, the Adolescents and Agent Orange. But five minutes of his new band, and my only reaction was "what were they thinking?" What were X thinking? What was Soto thinking? I don't mind hardcore punks growing up and calming down. I don't even mind them playing country music. There's nothing inherently wrong with country music! But to see one of the leading figures in early hardcore play mediocre-at-best formulaic country-rock - it just doesn't make sense. Not only was it some of the least edgy music imaginable, the songwriting and performance weren't even good. Not terrible either, but Soto is not someone who should be aiming for the middle.

If you were there, I was the person at the back loudly calling for "Kids of the Black Hole." I don't think he heard me, but if he did, he certainly didn't honor the request. After the set, I noticed someone on stage was wearing an Adolescents t-shirt and I just found it depressing.

When X took the stage, things got a lot better. First of all, the band had allowed the audience to somehow select the set list before the show - I don't know how this was done, but I was pleasantly surprised to find a mix of the band's poppier material and their most classic punk cuts.

Front-couple Exene Cervenka and John Doe were in fine form. Though they do look a bit weathered (X formed more than thirty years ago, after all), they had a lot of energy for old fogeys. The lanky and still boyish Doe really put his heart into playing, lurching and jumping and holding nothing back. Cervenka was a more stable presence, friendly and grounded in center stage. Her performance was cool, comfortable and straightforward, but not without a lot of passion as well. Sadly, her mic was too low in the mix, but her focused delivery carried her parts when the volume couldn't.

Billy Zoom cut an odder figure on stage. Like the others, he was clearly having fun, but his wide smile remained entirely unchanged throughout the set. He played amazingly, as one would expect, and he definitely rocked out, but in comparison to the others on stage, he seemed the furthest removed from the band's youthful punk beginnings.

No matter what, the chance to see a band like X live in incredible for those of us who were in diapers or even just a twinkle in our parents' eyes when X rocked L.A. After Steve Soto's depressing performance, it was nice to see someone who was keeping the spirit alive.

This person put up a ton of pictures from the show, if you're interested.

Dust It Off: The Adolescents - The Adolescents

Album: The Adolescents
Frontier Records, 1981

Although the Adolescents are considered a classic band of the early 80's West Coast punk scene, outside of punk cirles, they've never acheived the same level of recognition as their peers Black Flag, Minor Threat and the Dead Kennedys - to name a few. That's despite the fact that this, their first and best album, was recorded and released before Black Flag's masterpiece Damaged and Minor Threat's first EP. It also easily predates the first proper releases by their venerated Orange County peers Social Distortion, DC's seminal Bad Brians and L.A.'s Descendents. The list could go on, but my point is simply that though the Adolescents were influenced by all these bands, they mastered and honed the style, recorded it and sent it out into the world while many of the groups who touched off the hardcore movement were still just beginning to get their shit together.

On the surface, The Adolescents sounds exactly like you'd expect from early hardcore - simple, fast and loud. But a closer attention to detail reveals that even as the hardcore was only beginning to define its identity, the Adolescents were already pushing its boundaries. Their arrangements are far more complex than the three-chord constructions of their contemporaries, and their songs are augmented with slower sections and even guitar solos, both big no-no's in the original hardcore rulebook.

But despite that, The Adolescents don't sound like a proto-punk band still filtering out the excesses of arena rock - the complexity never seems self-indulgent and never takes the focus off the music's loud-fast core. The Adolescents sound like a band that has fully grasped the essence of hardcore punk and its implications and moved on to expand its horizons, all by 1981.

Nor do they sound like a punk band that has overthought its sound and lost its spirit. The truly "adolescent" yell of Tony Cadena (who was just 18 at the album's release) is geniune.

The album gets off on the right foot with the opener "I Hate Children" (final line: "Kill all children dead!"). Anthems like "No Way" and the more lyrically thoughtful "Ameoba" are classics. The common themes like rejection by peers ("No Friends," "Creatures") and political repression ("Democracy") make plenty of appearances, but they stand alongside more personal lyrics. The anguished chorus of "Who Is Who" proclaims "the walls are closing in on me / I don't know what to do," while the fictional drug addict in "Self Destruct" admits "Crying, I'm sorry, I'm out of my head."

The album's true peak is its centerpiece "Kids of the Black Hole," a whopping five-minute track that despite its length, doesn't back off the high-speed attack of the rest of the album. Lyrically, the song is a potent tale of the depravity of youth culture, taking to task both their peers and society as a whole for leaving an entire generation directionless, drug-dependent and without a future. Musically, a two-note lead sounds like Joy Division on speed, while a careful arrangement keeps the song interesting throughout its entire span - a good five times the length of most hardcore songs.

Years ahead of its time, Adolescents is an essential album of early 80's American punk. It's also a rare musical acheivement for its genre, one that could appeal to a broad audience far beyond hardcore's usual boundaries.