Review Summary: Summertime punk earworms x LGBT+ solidarity bangers: drink up!
It’s weird to think of skate punk as an old genre, but there you go: what starts in the ‘80s doesn’t always stay in the ‘80s. It may in fact live on for multiple decades in good health. This doesn’t mean that you and everyone you know aren’t going to die someday. No youth without mortality; yesterday’s youthful music has an unsettling way of cementing this at points. Inconvenient. Troubling. Don’t fret. Korean skate punk trio Drinking Boys And Girls Choir are nothing if not full of vitality, playing the kind of music that could have come out in any year in the last three decades and hit exactly the right mark. They’re fast but not too fast, fun but not frivolous, and rejuvenating without necessarily reinventing any of their style. Their latest release
Marriage Licence, named in reference to their country’s dinosaur same-sex marriage legislation, is a perfect summertime punk album and you should hear it.
The Choir’s Boys and Girls, respectively, are out in full form here:
Marriage Licence thrives on the interplay between its male and female vocals, courtesy of its whole roster. The upshot is energised and ecstatic, catchy and sweet but with frequent moments of bite. There’s of an ache of nostalgia to the band’s brightest melodic tracks (“환*기 Time”, “My Second Universe”, “Wish”), but they intersperse these with enough shortfire rippers to avoid a full-on pop-punk mooch. These heavier cuts are good fun where they appear, but outside of the frenetic “Grab the chance”, they have a skittish quality, adrenalised palette cleansers that always seem a little tangential to the album’s overall focus. Clocking in as four of the shortest numbers on a 25-minute album, this mishmash is more a casual disparity than a serious pitfall. Still, the band do so well trading off blithe twitter with wood chipper on the early kickstarter “ODOBY” that a little more interplay between the various odds and ends of their toolkit may have benefitted the rest of the tracklist. Sunny and melodic vs. speedy and ephemeral: por que no los dos?
The heart of what this album does very, very right is traceable mainly to its pop spark. This is what adds such bounce to the vocal tradeoffs and instantly endearing surf guitar on “There is no spring”; it’s all over the rise and fall of the vocal melodies “환*기 Time”, a one-song case study for the sweet side of bittersweet; it radiates from the heartthrob closer “Wish”, just in case anyone remains unconvinced by the end of the album. These tracks are all individually enchanting and have exactly what it takes to make an exuberant sound feel personally revitalising; they’re infectious, fun, full of heart, and deliciously succinct. I’ve had them all on repeat for longer than responsible and advise you to do the same at the nearest convenience.
Marriage Licence is great: get on it.
