Cut the Top Off, Let’s Drive

This Bike is a Pipe Bomb - Convertible

There’s something very compelling to me about a brutally honest display of Americana, and the spirit of culture that pokes its timid and weathered little head from under it. I don’t mean green lawns, lemonade, stars and stripes, bald fucking eagles, or NASCAR, I mean the dirty and the dejected, the genuine and the poetic, the lost drops of honey in a bucket of tar, ripe with hurricane-mildew and piss from the aforementioned lemonade drinkers. I’m talking about the frontier spirit, the will to change and to demand change, the quiet sound of a nose on the grindstone.

From “go”, we hear the scratches of a jangly distortion and a male/female harmonic wail. Rymodee carries the vocals into southern melody. Behind the simple punk bass-lines and the simple punk drum-beats is a heartfelt, human sound. There’s something that catches us in his voice. It’s a universal sadness—the cries of the down-trodden. But it’s not just a major bummer, there’s also something playfully sweet in it. The album has a very human feel; it’s raw and relentless at the expense of it not sounding cool. And there’s nothing slick here, the band isn’t making a play before an international tour—this is music for the sake of music.

The songs may sound like the cookie-cutter political beer-shits (sorry, my favorite Bukowski-ism) that belong to bands people seem to associate them with on the surface. But this is human politics. This is the politics of culture, to and from the below-the-liners. The songs are about injustice, pain, genuine love, and the tragedy of American reality. They cover “The Preacher and the Slave” and “Strange Fruit”, both made popular in our familiar past, both an illumination on lingering social issues.

These shitty ditties come and go quickly, and the small voice of reason from real American folk is quickly drowned out by our trigger-happy, lemonade-drinking, auto-tune synth bullshit contemporaries. This is the rugged and unflashy human history, told from the disgusting underbelly of American culture—the story of folks just gettin’ by.

-Drew