3. Drive Like JehuYank Crime
I was born in 1985, so at the time this record came out I was mostly a radio and MTV kid, and I guess it was still a good time to be that. I was into a lot of hip-hop, rock, grunge, R&B, pop-punk, I was heavy into Bush, Nirvana, The Offspring, Green Day, that’s about the time that Dookie came out. This record I came back around on at some point in the 2000s when I was heavy into digital downloading. I was using Soulseek quite a bit to download entire records and I was doing research on the internet into different genres that I was into. By this time I was pretty heavily into groups like Fugazi. From getting into punk I got into hardcore punk, and from hardcore punk I got into Minor Threat, from Minor Threat I got into all the Dischord Records stuff and post-hardcore in general and Drive Like Jehu was just one of those bands that I discovered in that process. The first time I listened to it, it blew my fucking mind.
If I don’t listen to it often and I give myself space between each listen of the album, still to this day it blows my mind. Just how frigging raw and aggressive and explosive the album is, from end to end. I think ‘Here Come the Rome Plows’ is probably one of the gnarliest openers on a rock record ever. I just love the explosivity and the audacity of the album, honestly. I love how overwhelming the sound of it is, whether that be from a more explosive track or one that’s a little bit more low key like ‘Do You Compute’. It was on a major label and it flopped and it went down from there. That was the thing with a lot of majors in the 90s, because the underground and grunge was having a bit of a moment around that time, there was a bit of risk-taking on some underdogs to see if they would take off commercially, whether it be the Melvins or any number of other groups.
