Despite the fact that melody and metal have had a long and winding history, the almost pop punk levels of autotuned slickness that crashes into metalcore style br00tal breakdowns in bands like Chunk! No, Captain Chunk! is just about where you’d imagine there’s a line drawn in the sand between the current and previous generations of music fan.
If there are bands that will make a slightly worn music writer type scratch their head after a decade of going to punk/hardcore shows, it’s stuff like this. It takes a while to get your finger on exactly why this is, but eventually you end up surmising that the problem with tracks like ‘Taking Chances’ and ‘Haters Gonna Hate’ are so jarring because, despite being ambitious enough to blend a plethora of genres, every single genre arrives in its most generic form. The pop punk bits could have been produced by the most cynical pop punk bands on the planet, and the same goes for the metalcore parts as well.
What the record also really shows is that either studio trickery has finally got to the point of actually polishing a selection of turds, or it’s time to put to bed the “they can’t even play that well” reason for disliking a band entirely. I’d much rather hear a great bit of songwriting from some “okay” musicians than I would lazy songwriting from good musicians, which is kinda what feels like is happening here rather than an engineer tweaking the shit out of some crappy guitar work. And, still, without the pleasure of seeing the band live (“live”?), how could you ever know?
Outside of all that, it can’t really be said that the band don’t know exactly what they’re doing with ‘Pardon My French’. It revels in its own lazy references, hamfisted squeals and screams, and the flashes of good bits (see the verses of ‘The Progression Of Regression’) show that they probably had to take this oh-so-obvious yet extreme approach to genre mashing in order to get anyone to listen in the first place.
It’s probably safe to assume that they know fully well that their listeners have that very modern, Joey Tribbiani complex about music anyway, so why the hell not give people what they want? Custard, good. Jam, good. Meat, good. The thing is that we actually laugh at Joey because he enjoys a beef trifle, and we laugh at Rachel for making the awful thing in the first place (when IS Friends back on E4, anyway?). Anyway, digressions aside, it’s pretty certain that Chunk! No, Captain Chunk! are the natural solution to the problem of people that have got so lazy about their music that they can’t even be bothered to change a song to get different genres, and they really are the perfect band for the job in that respect. A load of different things going on, some that work, some that really don’t, but it’s better to just to take a deep breath and carry on with your day than worry too much about the ridiculousness of all of it.
TOM AYLOTT