Pukin All Over

Photo by Rick BainBROKEN BOTTLES
"RADIOACTIVE SAN ONOFRE" (SEVEN-INCH SINGLE)
HOSTAGE RECORDS

There's more to Broken Bottles than reminiscing about when Gothic chicks were cool—maybe you heard that song on KMXN; they certainly love the fuck out of it!—and they finally get to trot it out on this Hostage Records debut single. And it turns out to be a nice detour from the established Hostage sound as well as a nice throwback to the punk bands Posh Boy used to pry out of Fullerton circa 1981-ish. The Bottles come in with two unabashedly downtempo growlers that guitarist/singer Jes the Mess keeps so low and steady you'd think he's on a bombing run: "Radioactive San Onofre"—this can't be the first time someone has celebrated the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station's boob technology in song, can it?—is a campy-but-catchy B-movie riff on surfing the apocalypse; B-side "Poor Me" does adolescent blues much like the Adolescents' blue album, turning on the funny-'cuz-it's-true chorus "Poor me/Poor me/Pour me another drink!" Jes' redline-whine vox are a bit of an acquired taste—like spam musubi!—but it's what the genre demands; once punk bands figured out how to harmonize in tune, it was downhill straight to whatever hell Journey's rotting in right now. A little grit'll do you good. Also: bonus points for using the words "tits" in both songs on the single, prefaced by "concrete nuclear" and "I'm gonna puke all over your." If that's not everything OC is about, well, then we've been puking in all the wrong places.

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