Every Record I Own - Day 618: Jawbreaker 24 Hour Revenge Therapy
I bought 24 Hour Revenge Therapy on my last day of high school. I celebrated graduation by going to see some local punk bands play at a rental hall in downtown Tacoma, and on the way I swung by the neighborhood record store to pick up this LP. The next day I played 24 Hour on repeat as I sorted through all my things and packed up my room. My parents were moving back to Hawaii and I was staying in Tacoma to work for the summer before starting college in the fall. I cleared my shelves, took all my posters and show fliers down off my wall, emptied my desk drawers, and sorted through my closet as Jawbreaker played over and over again. It was a bittersweet day. There was an obvious sense of satisfaction with finishing high school and an excitement of my upcoming independence, but there was also the expectant sadness of closing the chapter of adolescence and preparing for adulthood.
24 Hour Revenge Therapy opens with “The Boat Dreams from the Hill,” a song that feels a bit nebulous in its opening verse. The drums are punchy and the bass has a nice gritty tone (courtesy of Steve Albini and Electrical Audio recording studio), but the guitar seems a little fizzy, the vocal melody sounds non-committal, and the lyrics are… about a neglected boat? Maybe not the strongest opening minute of music on first listen, but then there’s a break and a choke at the minute mark, and Blake Schwarzenbach sings “I wanna be a boat…” and everything falls in place with a big triumphant chorus. “I wanna learn to swim, then I’ll learn to float, and begin again.”
Over 25 years later, that chorus still gives me goosebumps. It’s a song about yearning, about hope, about realizing your potential, and it’s all in a metaphor about a neglected boat on some guy’s lawn. From there the album delivers a curious double dose of surface-level frivolity in “Indictment” and “Boxcar.” Both songs are almost defiantly chipper pop songs, but both songs use their sugar coating to deliver a frank examination of the self-sabotaging pedantic punk scene. They’re the first songs I would latch onto on those first few spins because they sounded the most in-line with my listening habits, but they were also critical of that comfort and familiarity. They were songs about growing up and questioning your peer group. The oft-quoted chorus to “Boxcar”—“1, 2, 3, 4, who’s punk? what’s the score?”—is the perfect quip in response to the relentless judgements of a community that was supposed to be your ally.
Jawbreaker then descends into the more turbulent aspects of their art. “Condition Oakland” tapped into the feeling of yearning from “The Boat Dreams…” but stripped away the optimism, leaving only this sense that resolution and comfort were something just out of reach. And then there was the longing of “Ache,” a song I would listen to countless times during my freshmen year of college when I needed comfort. Some songs were tougher nuts to crack: “West Bay Invitational” always felt cryptic—a song about… an exclusive party? It felt deliberately difficult, but the final bars of the song provide melodic resolution, and then it feels like you’ve actually finally been let into that secret society. Those difficult songs were a big part of what kept me coming back, because you could hear the beauty buried within them, but it took some work as a listener to uncover them. This had always been Jawbreaker’s MO. Hell, they laid out that strategy on their first album when they sang “you don’t like the way we sound / we don’t like the way you hear.” I wound up listening to this record so many times that I wore out the grooves and had to buy the reissue a few years back.
If I love an album, I’ll love it forever. I don’t typically get worn out or exhausted on a piece of music to the point where my opinion of it turns sour. I’m more likely to just slowly phase out an old favorite that’s lost some of its luster. But I still play 24 Hour Revenge Therapy frequently. It’s an album that means a lot to me personally because it captures an era of my life and an era of the underground music community I loved, but it also touches on the timeless topics of maturity, longing, and desperation in a way that’s never too eager or too earnest. It’s a record that sounds like a willful smile in the face of adversity and a tight embrace in times of turmoil.
I love this record so fucking much it’s hard to even write about it because every song takes me to another time and place. It’s deeply embedded into my adult life because it came at such a profound moment, but it’s enduring allure is proof that beneath the grit and grime of distortion and Schwarzenbach’s gravelly voice is a record that touches upon a universal experience. There are two separate references to Jack Kerouac on the album, and those nods establish a parallel between the Beat king’s Legend of Dulouz—that semi-autobiographical tale of Kerouac’s journey from a young man relishing the open road and the boundless opportunities for new “kicks” in On the Road to the world-weary downtrodden artist in Big Sur. Over the span of 24 Hour Revenge Therapy’s 37-minute runtime, we’re given a similar survey of all the adventures and tragedies that come with independence, and it’s every bit as electric, rough hewn, and bittersweet as the journeys of Sal Paradise.
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