Strung out on punk rock
NOFX | R.E.M. | The Replacements | The New Pornographers
A little after midnight last night a billowing, bullying thunderstorm stuck. It rattled the blinds, buffeted doors and snuck rain through half-closed windows.
I’m in the UK, so a half-hour of lightning and thunder in the small hours of the morning can be considered disruptive – it certainly was to our sleep. But when I went for a walk this morning the only aftereffect was when a gentle wind evicted rain that had lodged in the trees the night before.
Nevertheless, I’m tired. The broken sleep having been preceded by a late-night writing about Fat Mike Gets Strung Out, the NOFX singer’s new instrumental album of his punk rock songs rearranged for violas, violins, cello and piano.
He’d mentioned the album last year in a free-wheeling interview that managed to touch on the two songs he wrote for Billie Eilish (but doesn’t know if she'll ever hear them) and the couple Rihanna’s production team asked him to write for her.
“I write all kinds of music. It's just no one takes me seriously because I wear pink leather and I play in a punk band. But perfect songs are actually very sophisticated.” He told me, adding: “I have probably 40 songs I've written for other people.”
Asked what was coming out of his speakers, he said he’d been going way back.
“I’ve been listening to Cole Porter recently - the Masters. Even like Barry Manilow and of course Lennon and McCartney, and Billy Joel - they knew how to write fucking chord progressions. And what a different world it was, in the ‘70s when people cared about songs and chord progressions. Not so much the lyrics back then. Stupid lyrics in the 70s.”
In that context a fully instrumental album kind of makes sense.
And rather than being a joke – a perennial question where NOFX are concerned, Fat Mike and his collaborators have produced a baroque collection of tunes that foreground their melodies, breathing new life into some and adding pathos to others.
Writing the review also took me down a mini rabbit hole of classical punk rock, alt rock and indie songs and strings.
For covers, LA’s Vitamin String Quartet somewhat dominate, with versions of tunes by Pixies, Elliott Smith, Arcade Fire, The Cure, The Offspring, Paramore, Jane’s Addiction, Soul Asylum and so very many more.
But it was VSO’s cover of The Bleeding Heart Show by The New Pornographers that captured my attention back when mp3 blogs were a thing and Fluxblog, the first of those, covered it (you can read Fluxblog on Substack).
Overall though the VSO covers veer from affecting to one-listen novelties (possibly half-a-listen novelties in the case of their attempt at Debaser by the Pixies), which is far from the case with Fat Mike Gets Strung Out.
Yet more accomplished 90s alt rock string work went into R.E.M.’s two biggest albums, particularly Automatic for the People (fair warning: I’ll likely try and shoehorn in nearly as many references to R.E.M. as I will to Bob Mould and his bands).
But where on Out of Time the band “kinda hummed along to the symphony” as drummer Bill Berry put it, admitting “they kinda struggled with it”, for Automatic they brought in a heavyweight.
Drive, The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite, Everybody Hurts and Nightswimming all featured string arrangements by Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and were integral to the record’s sombre yet life-affirming mood.
Something else that’s quite the mood is He Didn’t, the Bob Mould sung tune from 2000’s Hyacinths and Thistles by indie rock band The 6ths. (I could have sworn it was from The Magnetic Fields’ 1999 three-volume concept album 69 Love Songs, but as they’re both Stephin Merritt bands I guess I’ll forgive myself).
One final string note to end on.
The latest salvo in the reissue campaign for The Replacements – the Let It Bleed boxset for their 1985 major label debut Tim – is out on Friday.
Ahead of that you can hear a previously unreleased cello version of Can't Hardly Wait.
Bonus writing: Fat Mike gets strung out and goes quartet-core
Main issue image by Josep Molina Secall on Unsplash