Recession blues yall and I’ve been digging through the personal back catalog to see what I can hock for food. Apparently nobody buys CDs any more so I’m back to flipping vinyl. There in the back of the closet I came across a vintage ’80s slab from Dag Nasty which has since gone out of print. Most are familiar with their Dischord releases – Can I Say and Wig Out and Denkos – but the subsequent release of Field Day had the misfortune of coming out on now defunct Giant Records and is mostly unavailable.
Haters would say that Field Day marked the onset of Brian Baker’s slow descent into pop metal hell and it’s hard to argue against it when he soon departed for the likes of Junkyard. It’s definitely a more polished, less aggressive effort and probably more a forerunner of bands like Sunny Day Real Estate or Jawbreaker than it is a natural progression from Wig Out.
But tracks like “Things That Make No Sense” and “Trouble Is” are brilliant in their own right with atypical flourishes like vocal harmonies and a crisp production that belies its DIY origins. ”Ambulance Song” is arguably an experiment with mixed results and the band clearly lacks the chops to put out a convincing lounge tune. I’ll chalk it up to that mid-life phase bands go through when self-consciousness overtakes raw passion and they start citing Coltrane as an influence.
Dag Nasty really never got a lot of play even back in their so-called heyday. Other than a straight-edge ethos, they were decidedly conventional in the midst of an era where The Dead Kennedys were putting out stuff like Frankenchrist and GG Allin was constantly threatening to off himself on stage. Their musicianship arguably surpassed most of their peers and they were lyrically much more introspective.
Minor Threat still gets most of the glory as hardcore’s poster boys – as evidenced by the fact that tweens are now buying their counterfeit shirts at the mall – but the first three Dag Nasty releases are classics of the second wave and sound as contemporary today as they did 20 years ago.
MP3 :::
Dag Nasty – Trouble Is
Dag Nasty – Things That Make N
