KCUF - Modern Primitive Punk CD Review

Walk down the cd aisles of your local Best Buy or Circuit City and look around. You could grab almost any cd that you run across, stick it in your stereo, and hear a batch of songs that was meticulously thought out, overproduced, geared towards a predetermined audience’s tastes, and feeling like it was created to fit within a certain musical template. It’s maddening how often bands create CDs that fit within the confines of a well defined genre or genre subset merely to appeal to a certain demographic. How often do bands make CDs just for themselves? Not often. Then again, there aren’t often releases like the self titled debut from KCUF that come around.

There should be no question about the motives of the members of KCUF in the orchestration of the 22 tracks on Modern Primitive Punk. These are songs, snippets of songs, pieces of randomness, and tongue-in-cheek “remixes” put together simply because Sean, Jeff, and John like making random, sometimes simple, sometimes shredding, sometimes melodic, sometimes not, sometimes interesting, sometimes underdeveloped, yet always punk tunes.

To be completely clear, this is a dirty, old school styled punk release. Beyond that core structure, you can hear a few scant influences from other genres that have come to pass over the last decade or so, such as nu-metal (yeah, believe it or not), stoner rock, and spazzcore. Recognize, however, that these influences are not very noticeable, but their small flourishes color the small developmental aspects of this band. To help keep this cd sounding dirty and rough, there isn’t a whole lot of post production work to gloss over the grimy, gritty live style that most of the songs fall into. Even guest appearances by members of System of a Down, Korn, and Slipknot don’t pull this band out of their rough and tumble style of sound. At times, however, there is definitely a need for some post-production work and trimming of tracks, but the band chose to err on the side of rawness.

22 tracks is definitely a lot and portions of the cd scream out for quality control in order to eliminate some of the crap on this CD. For example, “Josh” is basically a really crappily recorded demo track with asinine lyrics and scratchy guitars. Then there are the constant, puzzling interludes such as “Bad Poem”, “Ferral Kid”, and “Goldfish”. Other times you have spoken interludes. None of them really serve a purpose other than to be something odd tossed in between tracks.

Some of the songs could also have used a little more work. The DJ Starscream “remix” tracks really bring nothing to the album other than some added bloops and beeps that sound horribly out of place on a predominantly punk album. I mentioned before that most of the songs are pretty raw, which works for the type of dirty punk music that KCUF creates, but by the end of the album you might find yourself wishing more than a few of the songs weren’t so murky in spots.

Will any of you really enjoy this album? I’m not sure, but I can tell you that it sure as hell sounds like KCUF had an amazingly fun time recording this disc. So who cares if anyone outside of the band actually likes the cd. They obviously did this to have fun, and they had a ton of it.