Ok, so here’s a feature I’m probably going to abandon like most of the others I’ve trialed. To convince myself not to do this, I’m going to post these sporadically, so expect some days when I post more than one and some months where I don’t post any at all. Its pretty much just going to run on how much free time I have, and how motivated I feel.
So here’s the concept: I use a site called RateYourMusic to catalogue all the music I listen to. All albums I rate 4.5 are tagged as “amazing”. Today, I hit 101, and I decided I wanted to elaborate on them, because all the albums I’ve rated 5 stars are generally considered classics within their respective scenes, whereas the ones I’ve rated 4.5 are often more obscure. So, without further ado, I give you, in alphabetical order, the first one:
AJJ - Only God Can Judge Me
Genuinely, this would be up there with my all time favorite EPs. The only ones I can think of that best this are the first two Black Flag releases, as well as the first releases by Minor Threat and Fugazi. Given the notoriety of the names I’ve just listed, you can probably tell that I hold this EP in very high esteem.
I think Only God Can Judge Me has to be AJJ’s most melancholic release. Sure, the album that proceeded it, People Who Can Eat People Are The Luckiest People In The World, was Darker, but a lot of the songs, such as the murder romp ‘Bad Bad Things’, can be considered more darkly humorous than humorlessly dark.
On Only God, shit gets real. Lines such as “I’ve had a lot of friends/and they’ve had a lot of drugs/and those drugs made my friends rot away, rot away” can’t really be laughed at. Unless, of course, you’re a straight edge supervillian, and your laughter is more maniacal than genuine.Theirs an almost defiant sense of childish hopelessness on ‘Growing Up’, where Sean Bonnette laments “I’ve fallen down/and can’t get up/and soon/I’m not going to bother/I’m going to lay on the ground ‘til I die”. Hell, its probably apparent that your in for a rough ride from the word go, as the EP opens with the line “show me your tears”.
Perhaps the only break from the misery is ‘Human Kitten’, a disturbing surrealist tale of a woman who gave birth to kittens and mice. The imagery contained within the song recounts either a nightmare or a salvia trip, but either way its enticingly wrong.
And yet, I keep returning to this EP, because on a bad day, this 15 minute swear-along goes down a treat. From existential crises to classic break up songs, Only God has every kind of angst you can think of, and despite its mellow acoustic leanings, its probably among the most emotionally cathartic releases I’ve ever heard.
