Album Reviews

This one needs a bit of a backstory. Back in 2001, Screeching Weasel co-founder John Jughead Pierson (also of Even In Blackouts, The Mopes,…) wrote a book called ‘Weasels In A Box,’ a meta-fictional exploration in which Pierson recounts life on the road with a punk-rock band in the mid-1990s. I just browsed through some reviews on Amazon and a guy named Scott gave the book 5 stars and strongly recommends it to “avoid wasting your life being monogamous for 15 years”. Scott hasn’t actually read ‘Weasels In A Box’, but he does mention reading two other books so thankfully his review isn’t entirely unfounded.

Anyway… that was 2001. Fast-forward 20+ years and the book is being re-released on paperback and audiobook (here’s your chance to finally read it, Scott!). To celebrate the re-release, Pierson decided to record some songs as Semi-Famous, the fictional band that appears in the book. So along with Mixtapes’ Ryan Rockwell, Pierson started writing pop-punk songs in the vein of Screeching Weasel. It turned out to be way more fun than expected. So they kept going and enlisted singer/guitarist Billy Brown (Crash and Burn, Ashers, Unseen), drummer Tyson Cornell (Scooby Don’t) and singer/guitarist Poli van Dam (Bombpops, The Poli van Dam Band)  to round out the band.

While ‘Destroy Ourselves’ could have very well  turned out to be little more than an okay album designed to help promote a book release, it is more like a love letter to the scene, written by the very people who helped shape it. 14 Tracks worth of catchy, energetic and raw pop-punk that take it back to pop-punk’s golden age, while still managing to give it a modern spin. Nice!

And hey Scott, if you are by any chance reading this… hope you are doing well!