Swingin’ Utters – Five Lessons Learned – Review

Swingin’ Utters

Five Lessons Learned (Fat)
by Chris Best

In late 1998, when the fickle musical fancies of the media have moved away from kissing punk rock’s collective ass to moistening the posterior of dumb frat-boy rock (again), the Swingin’ Utters return to deliver an album for the folks who decided to stick around. While the Swingin’ Utters have always been brilliant and soulful, they’ve completely outdone themselves this time. This is their best album ever, and yes, that is saying something.

Five Lessons Learned takes the best aspects of all their material, mixes it together and adds a musical scope that goes well beyond the trendy nods to ska or Irish folk music that have been so overdone of late. It has the hopeful and yearning sounds of their early demos and singles (as featured on More Scared and the Sounds Wrong EP), the energy and momentum of The Streets of San Francisco, the musically adventurous spirit of A Juvenile Product of the Working Class, and enough praise to go around for the whole band. While Darius Koski wrote the bulk of the material in the early days, that is not the case now. Max Huber, rhythm guitarist, has thrown some amazing songs into the mix and wrote a good chunk of the album’s material. But just to make one thing clear, no one songwriter carries this album, the whole band hauls their weight, including the guests they brought in [Howie Pyro and Fat Mike, among others, fill in on bass and Max Huber’s old high school friend from Washington DC, Seth Lorenzi (ex-Circus Lupus among many others), plays keyboards on “My Bastard Son”].

The big question one might ask is “Isn’t it sad and a little pathetic to release your best album when the rest of the world doesn’t give a damn anymore?” Well, no. Bands like Rancid or Green Day can look forward to some kind of a mainstream future, but the bands on the lower rungs of the punk rock totem pole don’t have that cushy luxury. The only thing they have is that addiction to playing and the love of the music they make. What the Swingin’ Utters are working toward is what few other groups or artists achieve. If they keep up the good work, they will be in the same league as Social Distortion (if they aren’t already). If you like the Swingin’ Utters or you just want to hear one of the best punk rock albums put out this year, get this.
(PO Box 193690 San Francisco, CA 94119)