Records Revisited is a feature where we take albums that are 10+ years old, pull them off the shelf, dust them off, and see how they hold up.

Records Revisited: The Nerve Agents / Days of the White Owl (2000)

Revisited by: Tola Sweet [Tola Sweet plays guitar and writes songs for the Transducers, some of which can be found here.]

How does it hold up?

Alright, it’s been thirteen years (oh god, really?!) since this baby was flung out of California at high velocity, smattered with eyeliner and intermittent references to urban legends and military paraphernalia.  It was just re-released in very limited quantity by Revelation Records, for Record Store Day 2013.

The most stark memory I have involving this album is that I once had it playing very loud in my embarrassingly plum-colored and barely-functioning Mazda as I pulled into a Subway parking lot in 2004. Upon parking, I popped the car door open as one of the songs was ending, and incidentally I exposed a middle-aged soccer mom who was exiting the shop to a concise four-note rapid blurting of noise and unintelligible nasal screaming. The woman in the Mom Jeans glared at me with a potent facial-expression cocktail of utter confusion, spritzed with disdain.

In under two seconds, a piece of this record made a grown woman look at me as though I embodied every alienating and annoying thing about modern youth. It was as if I’d pulled up, opened the door, and splashed her with a cup of my own urine. Pure bewilderment, followed by anger.

So let’s pop this sucker in and take it for another spin around!

Right, so this record actually opens (and closes) with a creepy and amateurishly plonked-out piano melody, which I’d forgotten. It sounds a bit lame and forced, until you realize that it’s used as a contrast to set up one of the most blazingly oh-shit-here-we-go intro songs on any punk album in recent memory. ‘Fall of the All American’ gets you PSYCHED to hear this album.  

I could write Andy Outbreak a love letter based on this song (Oh right, also: Andy Outbreak was in this band, pre-Distillers. Andy is a drum monster from a planet where people are six-and-a-half feet tall and can drum very fast and accurately while looking like they’re calmly sitting down for tea. Also, he’s an amateur wrestler. A fucking amateur wrestler – what does your drummer do!?)

If you were wondering when the lead singer’s cutting nasal vocals and incessant screaming were going to get old rather than curious and interesting, it’s the third track. Just warning you. Exactly the third track. I didn’t like the vocals ten years ago, and they’ve actually gotten worse with time, as I’ve since found great bands whose singers sound less like cats being attacked with electric hedge trimmers.

I want badly for this album to be artsy and/or creepy. However, it mostly pump-fakes toward this and instead I’m left with an unexpected brand of California hardcore bro-screamery.

A good example is ‘Off Come the Blindfolds.’ Listen to the first thirty seconds! It’s great! They’ve totally changed directions! And it’s a much needed break from all the senseless Earth-A.D.-Era Misfits group shouting. If you don’t like Dante Sigona’s (huge Danzig nerd, author of previous piano riff and album artwork, if memory serves) surf-rock bass riff here, you’re a killer of sunshine and good times and should be forced into a Clockwork Orange-type scenario wherein you’re forced to listen to Dick Dale and Link Wray forever. A few seconds later though, and we’re back in Bro Land, where punk rockers wear camouflage shorts and no shirt.  Ew.

Stop this, guys.  I want the piano back. Actually, what about ‘Fall of the All American’? – The first track – Can we just have that back? Can you play that for the rest of the album? No? Alright, moving on…

Something else I’d forgotten in the years since I first decided that this LP was a great soundtrack for skateboarding (it still is): Davey Havok is on this album for like five seconds. It’s bewildering, right in the middle of a song, and then he’s gone! It’s as if he popped by the recording studio and they were like, “Hey, do you have time to sing just these three words for us? We don’t want you to sully up all this screaming with your comparatively clean and melodic vocals that people would enjoy, we’re just looking to record something that makes people constantly rewind it and say, ‘What the fuck? Is that Davey Havok?’”

I want very much to like ‘Days of the White Owl’ as much as I did in Ye Olde 2000s (Lest you be mistaken, I was a major fan of this band, wore their merch, nerded out over interviews, and even fumbled through teaching myself the piano parts!), but as the years go on I find it loses its charm. I would rather pluck out the few gems (‘Fall…’ and ‘Out on the Farm’) and skip the rest.

[Editor’s note: What happens at :35 in this video is the best thing you’ll see all day.]

Re-Buy it ? / Download it? / Declare it the Musical Equivalent of a Cup of Urine to the Face?

I wouldn’t buy this record again. Partly because I’m poor, and partly because I wouldn’t buy it.

Now, if Revelation were to release a ‘Fall of the All American/Out on the Farm”’single, I would be all over that. I’d not only buy it, but I’d frame it and surround it with heart-shaped pictures of the band, like it were Tiger Beat or something. I’d take it out every now and then just to smell it. It would be great.

P.S. I understand that lead singer Eric Ozenne was in the military. So if you don’t hear from me again, it will be because I’ve been assassinated by Punk Rock Rambo.