Review: AJJ – Dirty Old Power
Dirty Old Power is the sound of a band too world-weary to keep up, sadly
It’s sort of hard to pin down the anti-folk icons of AJJ. Originally the collaborative duo of singer/guitarist Sean Bonnette and bassist Ben Gallaty (slowly developing into a formal, full band), the Arizona music project has been a lot of things in their career: the much-maligned genre of folk punk? Used to be. Introspective indie-rockers? More or less. Effectively simple emotional and political communicators? Absolutely. Admittedly immature lyricists at other times? At times. A massively divisive stalwart of DIY music earning both critical acclaim and sizable derision? More than anything else. As for me, AJJ are a group that means multitudes in a way few groups, metal or otherwise, could ever mean to me.
For an extensive portion of my adolescence and early adulthood, few songwriters had touched my heart and inspired my creativity like Bonnette. Something about his balance between bitter cynicism and an earnest love for humanity is deeply relatable in a world where people have only seemed to forget their own worth (and the worth of each other) more and more. He’s strange, childish, awkward, and rough-around-the-edges at times in his writing, but few modern lyricist throw as much unflinching honesty and sincerity in a zeitgeist so disaffected and irony-infatuated (to be fair, the downsides often benefit the works).
This ethos of shameless integrity carried them through the bittersweet acoustic punk of People Who Can Eat People Are the Luckiest People in the World and Can’t Maintain, the sarcastic negativity of Knife Man, and the fuzzy Neutral Milk Hotel-inspired absurdist slacker rock of The Bible 2 and Christmas Island. While most listeners disengage with the group’s output after Knife Man, it’s their later indie rock work that carries personal weight for me. The Bible 2‘s contemplation on childhood trauma, suicidal ideations, and ultimate themes of self-forgiveness and acceptance of mortality frankly helped me through some of the hardest moments of my life up to this point. Christmas Island, on the other hand, has a set of deeply surreal lyrical motifs and power pop-inspired compositions that have slowly carried it to the top of my ranking in terms of their albums (a fact which surprised cellist Mark Glick deeply when talking before one of their shows).
The most recent leg of the band’s career has been equally as controversial with listeners; Disposable Everything and Good Luck Everybody are pessimistic records deeply political in topic and feature a more weathered sound somewhere between folksy sadness and that previously mentioned power pop. The latter is one of the group’s weaker efforts, with highlights like “Body Terror Song” and “Normalization Blues” existing around a number of less exciting songs with lyrics tainted with a level of internet-attached pre-Covid political thought that’s aged rapidly, leaving cuts like “Psychic Warfare” and “Feedbag” feeling limp and ineffectual. Comparatively, I would argue Disposable Everything is one of the band’s strongest efforts, embodying a lot of modern angst, confusion, and cynicism of the current political climate (as well as the personal joys and sorrows of Bonnette) with some of the best pieces of power pop and indie folk the group has ever penned (“Strawberry (Probably),” “Dissonance,” “A Thought of You,” “In the Valley,” and more).
So with the latter seeming to be a direct improvement of the ideas on the former, it would make sense that Dirty Old Power would either continue the upward swing or at least maintain a level of quality. Lead single “Phlamethrower” ranks as one of the group’s most fiery barn-burners, seeming to imply the record might lean more into that song’s garage punk sound. Yet, at the same time, follow up singles “Beauty and Truth 2” and “Destiny” were much more low-key and sleepy cuts that resembled themes and sounds that the group has arguably done to death (I swear, they have at least 4 songs that read extremely similar (and more effective) to “Beauty and Truth 2’s” mourning of objective truth set to folk guitars and a vaguely driving pace). The resulting album, too, feels like AJJ are either on autopilot or beat into submission by an unforgiving world.
As far as the strongest moments, the previously mentioned “Phlamethrower” is the most visceral punk song they’ve put out in years, depicting acts of arson against AI data centers. This song is preceded and further contextualized by the record’s best lyrical ballad titled “Update.” It’s a unique song written from the perspective of a man radicalized by his AI girlfriend being destroyed by an update to the chat bot (a situation all too common in our modern dystopia), providing empathy and understanding to a (most likely mentally unwell) target often met with acute mockery. “Hungry House” is this record’s “Body Terror Song” or “A Thought of You,” an experimental pop song filled with interesting musical ideas and evocatively emotional lyrics that result in a haunting end. “Human Centipede” is another high energy cut with some life and songwriting behind it. In terms of the folkier cuts, the title track and “Florid Language” are the tracks that are more interesting and gratifying than not, even if they aren’t as strong as cuts from the extensive AJJ back catalog.
The rest of the album, unfortunately, does very little to stand out after multiple listens. The second half of the record is most similar to the weaker moments of Good Luck Everybody: “Bitch Ass World” is a milquetoast pastiche-feeling send up of Neil Young, “Window in Yr Mind” feels like a hazy demo or recycled song that’s in one ear, out the other, “Wasted on a Boeing” is a nothing of a track that meanders for three-ish minutes, and “No Home in This World” is a sleepy piano cut only barely kept afloat by some relatably depressing lyrics on the state of modern life. Yet, even in its strongest moments, Dirty Old Power fails to consistently hit on ideas and concepts as clever as “Disposable Everything’s” nuanced musings on parenting in the end-times or “I Hate Rock and Roll Again” using the death of Bonnette’s favorite musicians as a metaphor for his own disillusionment with music as a whole. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that there just wasn’t as much earnest inspiration behind this new record, beyond a world-weary songwriter only growing more and more out of touch with a world in decline.
To be clear, I too have never felt more out of touch with modern life; if anything, this should be a lyrical concept of great effect to me. The end result of those ideas, however, is a record that’s ultimately easy on the ears, but deeply forgettable. If anything, it’s an inverse to what drew so many to this group: songs that sounded rough and messy, but contained deeply resonating and memorable ideas on human nature, corruption, and an eternal conflict between love for mankind and a defeated misanthropy that rages inside all who pay enough attention to the complicated bestial forms we all inhabit. Saying this about the songwriter who inspired me to start playing guitar, inspired me to keep living and not to give up, feels fucking awful, but I know that AJJ is not past the point of being able to make music that’s special and meaningful. I just can’t escape the feeling that Dirty Old Power resembles a resignation to the weight of current day America; it feels like a band giving up in real time at points and it bums me the fuck out. I’m still pretty deeply conflicted on the resulting record (as you can probably tell), but I refuse to give up on a band that has meant so much to me for so long. They deserve better, and they deserve better than Dirty Old Power can provide, sadly.
2.5/5 Flaming Toilets ov Hell
Dirty Old Power is out now through Bandcamp.
