Review Summary: It's... fast, and it's got more industrial pulse than a swarm of insects at a garbage dump.
Well, this feels like a little bit of a hard task that I've given myself. SNFU was--is, but for the most part, is no longer--a regularly grand five-piece hardcore punk band that was created in 1981. The only consistent members to have performed during every incarnation of the band, as of 2013, have been vocalist Ken Chinn (known as Mr. Chi Pig to fans), and drummer Jon Card. On this album, the Belke brothers, Marc and Brent, played the electric guitars, and Dave Bacon played bass guitar.
Throughout the 80s, they lived in their own existence, playing what was evidently a role in the punk movement that was never properly succeeded with any mass appeal; they wrote punk music that, in terms of compositional value, did exactly what punk was supposed to be all about
: thinking
ahead of the times. Their previous, and debut, album "...And No One Else Wanted to Play" participated in supporting the idea of forward thinking, but was not able to amount to the level of untapped creativity that would be present on
If You Swear, You'll Catch No Fish. No album that came after would, either.
This is most certainly the best SNFU album that the group ever would make, and it's experimental punk rock at its absolute finest. Given the great-but-not-fantastic average on here--also taking into account that a 3.5 tends to mean a 3.25 and in the same tendency a 4.0 means a 4.0--I can tell that either it's too off-beat for some people's tastes, or it only has the rating it does because only four people have voted and SNFU have made a few especially
uninteresting albums that have gotten much more widespread recognition, so some are subconsciously allowing their opinions of the horse to bear influence on their opinions of his craftsmanship.
On another note, this album is a thoroughly breathtaking arrangement of musical bells and whistles--of the non-literal variety, which is unfortunate, because I'm sure that the band at this point in time could have certainly utilized anything that was thrown at them, while recording, in a musically interesting and creative way.
I've begun to understand that, back in 1986, this album was a fleeting feat of lubricated ruckus on nuclear-powered fishback, which still doesn't summarize how it could have possibly been rendered in the four dimensions that are obvious (not including the hidden dimensions, often visited by groups such as maudlin of the Well)--the fourth dimension being a second space for depth on Scarecrow, which is replaced by a second space for height on every other track. This makes for one extra dimension that isn't found in most other music, and two whole dimensions above a lot of the stuff that is so shallow that it actually has
no depth--music that really doesn't deserve the opportunity of being compared to horses that are half as compelling as this album is.
The problem with all of this was that the band was living in their own existence, and wasn't cautious enough around figures in the music industry. After releasing this album, the band decided to sign with a label that would run them into the ground and milk them for more than what they could earn playing concerts that would cost $5 for admission; Cargo records exhausted the band as they were in the 80s, leading to their break-up near the end of 1989.
The reformed SNFU of the early 90s was not the same band, despite having only a different bassist. The SNFU of ten years following the mid 90s
could not for the life of them show a single shred of evidence that they were the same group that had recorded this album--perhaps keeping aside Chi Pig's inane, sometimes interesting stories (that are very much appropriately only interesting when not backed by lousy pop-punk, which they had resorted to regurgitating, although not as obnoxiously inhumane as NOFX had. Any utterance from Chi Pig, past or present, has also always been completely free of pretentiousness).
What I'm trying to convey is that If You Swear, You'll Catch No Fish contains only highly energetic, highly inspired punk music that has not been matched by them in their 32-year history, and it certainly surpasses much of the work of other artists. SNFU never resorts to using anything obvious on this release, instead opting to do things that hadn't previously been done by them, or anyone else.
Well, look at where we've gotten thus far... I'm really not sure if I can entertain this whole "summary" concept with any apparent success for this album, because I'm not sure if I can describe quite what the band has achieved.
I don't know how many other ways I could attempt to try to put into words this triumphant, yet so sadly unsung moss-coated musical milestone with words right now; maybe some other time, after experiencing it for much longer than I already have, I will.
