Grown Ass Men – Too Old To Die Young (grownassmen.bandcamp.com)
A casual observer could be forgiven for mistaking punk rock for a young person’s endeavor. Even a look at the band names would seem to bear this out: Youth Of Today, Youth Brigade (both of ’em), Youth Korps, Wasted Youth, Reagan Youth, etc. Many people find the music’s anger, volume, and lack of wider social acceptance more difficult to take with each subsequent year. They start alt-country bands or become DJs. They find Jesus and buy houses. They dote on their kids and devote their spare time to fantasy football. And all the while the irascibility fades or finds new direction. What once was an overriding belief that the world needed to be set right melts down to a shrug of the shoulders. The records are confined to closets and basements, the memories are compartmentalized or rendered in the sepia tones of nostalgia.
Except that it’s not always like this. Society would like little more than all these idealistic, uncommercial pursuits to be shed like a funny haircut prior to the first post-collegiate job interview, but some people can sustain these interests, imbuing them with meaning by demonstrating the lasting power of an aesthetic process outside standardized bounds. While the older punks may be the exception rather than the rule (especially those who can still deliver results on par with those offered by their younger selves), there are those who can let their years of experience inform and edify their later offerings.
Grown Ass Men – Too Old To Die Young (grownassmen.bandcamp.com)
A casual observer could be forgiven for mistaking punk rock for a young person’s endeavor. Even a look at the band names would seem to bear this out: Youth Of Today, Youth Brigade (both of ’em), Youth Korps, Wasted Youth, Reagan Youth, etc. Many people find the music’s anger, volume, and lack of wider social acceptance more difficult to take with each subsequent year. They start alt-country bands or become DJs. They find Jesus and buy houses. They dote on their kids and devote their spare time to fantasy football. And all the while the irascibility fades or finds new direction. What once was an overriding belief that the world needed to be set right melts down to a shrug of the shoulders. The records are confined to closets and basements, the memories are compartmentalized or rendered in the sepia tones of nostalgia.
Except that it’s not always like this. Society would like little more than all these idealistic, uncommercial pursuits to be shed like a funny haircut prior to the first post-collegiate job interview, but some people can sustain these interests, imbuing them with meaning by demonstrating the lasting power of an aesthetic process outside standardized bounds. While the older punks may be the exception rather than the rule (especially those who can still deliver results on par with those offered by their younger selves), there are those who can let their years of experience inform and edify their later offerings.
Richmond’s Grown Ass Men are a spot-on example of the latter. If the members’ years of experience playing in punk, hardcore, and metal bands were personified and lived in a better economy, that person would be pushing rapidly on retirement age. It’s entirely to Grown Ass Men’s credit that they can take an idea that’s not the most heavily covered – that of aging with punk rock rather than diverging from it – and apply it to pretty much every facet of their aesthetic without it seeming like some overdone joke. From the band’s name and album title to songs like “Too Old For This Shit,” the idea of embracing the music and its attendant lifestyle as something that can evolve alongside an individual permeates the songs, but never in a self-pitying or an accusatory fashion. While a great many other bands would chastise a former friend for settling down or changing themselves, a song like “White Picket Fences” takes a less confrontational approach with lines like “Here’s to old times I’m cherishing / They’re gone and that’s fine / I know you and I will never be the same / And that’s fine.”
The band prevents themselves from turning into a one-dimensional entity that continuously harps on the same topics, however. There are references to Richmond (“Fine Foods,” “Taking The First Shot”), depression (“Welcome To My World,” “Snooze Cruise”), bombing the Outer Banks, and heavy drinking (most of the songs, from what I can tell), amongst other things. The lyrics are able to walk a fine line, approaching serious topics with a sense of humor but without turning them into a joke, and approaching the less grave topics with a ferocity that suggests that their humor is perhaps bleaker than it might initially seem.
Musically, the band is able to channel some of the better elements of music’s harsher fringes produced by the past few decades without falling prey to the banal aspects of many respective sub-genres. They’re unquestionably fast – only two of the album’s seventeen songs exceed a minute in length – and will most likely get lumped in with the power violence sound that’s been regaining steam over the past few years. But unlike so many of the bands who think that an album can be carried by a few interspersed blastbeats and breakdowns, Grown Ass Men actually have well-written songs that are surprisingly catchy for a band that plays as fast as they do. It’s an approach not far removed from what Low Threat Profile has been doing the past few years, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both bands have a few years on most of their listeners; enough time to understand that speed and aggression are great, but memorable songs often need something more. In a world full of uninspired bands churning out rehash upon miserable rehash of bands that weren’t good in the first place, the existence of a band like Grown Ass Men, one who can channel wide-ranging and long-standing experience into something memorable and compelling, should not be taken for granted.
