Imagine you’re combing the racks of your favourite cool record store, one of those sub-High Fidelity dives with a coupla snooty geeks behind the counter and some Sun Ra covers on the wall. You’re flipping through the ’80s Hardcore section, looking for an ancient Millions Of Dead Cops LP, swimming in Raymond Pettibon graphics, when all of a sudden… What’s this? The Finger’s We Are Fuck You/Punk’s Dead Let’s Fuck? Who? What? Musta come from some boondock town in one of the “vowel states”?Ohio or Iowa. The singer’s name is Jim Beahm?a distant cousin, perchance, of Jan Paul Beahm, aka Darby Crash.
Enough already. Suffice to say this was the fantasy scenario in the minds of Jesse Malin and Ryan Adams as they killed time after working on Malin’s justly-praised The Fine Art Of Self Destruction last summer. Or so rumour has it, since both Malin and Adams legally have nowt to do with The Finger.
Presented and packaged anonymously, complete with SST-style design, We Are Fuck You/Punk’s Dead Let’s Fuck is an amusing homage to suburban US hardcore circa 1982, sounding like a hybrid of a hundred bands of the time but nothing like as pulverising as Black Flag in their prime. Most of it’s generic’core. Some of it sounds like late Ramones and some of it sounds like bad Bl