77 – Revolution Rock – Review

77

Revolution Rock (Elevator Music)
by Jon Sarre

Their broken English mouths all the typical leftie Ché Guevara/oppressed worker/”can’t believe it’s been over a quarter century since the military coup ousted Salvador Allende” crap, but what keeps these Iberian commies from just bein’ another humorless buncha “Kick Out the Rhetoric, Motherfucker!” crusties is their ability to assemble a good old fashioned snotty punk rock song outta the ratty bag a shopworn chops available to ’em (plus they do genuinely possess a sense of fun hitherto thought unavailable to the global politicized proletariat). The moniker they go by, 77, although as cliched as liberty spikes, is fitting, I guess, ‘specially seein’ as they play with the sloppy-ass fury of first LP Damned with scuzzy rockabilly and drunken reggae moments thrown in for good measure.

77’s lead weirdo, Paulo Eno, is supposedly this intellectual, a professor of some kind in Coimbra, Portugal, but mostly he yells and grunts a whole lot. His lyrics mostly consist of repeated sentence fragments as basic as “I Hate You” and “I’m so happy I can die,” at least when he’s not offering critiques of capitalist society or raising his glass to Ché or impossibly avant-garde composer John Cage (which sounds more like people fucking than anything else, so maybe that’s why it’s avant-garde) or hommaging Lower East Side high-lo-brow guitar symphonic moron Glenn Branca or screaming parts of Gene Vincent’s “Be Bop a Lula,” while his band roars through what sounds more like the Cramps’ cover of the Trashmen’s plagiarization of two Rivingtons’ songs, y’know, “Surfin’ Bird.” That, of course, is where the beauty lies and if ya don’t wanna, ya don’t haveta listen to a damn thing Eno says.
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