Sound of the City: Swearin’ Perfect the Poetic Punk Rock Argument
Kenosha is a bustling Wisconsin college town as well as an adequate nowhere in which to dump someone who has been deemed inconsiderate. There’s this peculiarity of detail to most Swearin’ songs, where a few spare images—“Kenosha” launches immediately from “Place me/ precariously/ Skinned knee/ I want to leave”—will form a kind of inexhaustible tableau of being wronged. This is when words surface curiously as half-poetry, half-argument. Punk rock serves this kind of curved perspective; as it travels, it gathers up furies.
I don’t know how to write about bands that I have an immediate, emotional response to, so I think instead I tried to interrogate why that is. I may have only come up with platitudes, like “music expresses the inexpressible.” But, you know, it’s, like, more than that.
Never miss the opening bands.