Photo by Brenden KjarOrange County's overdue for its own version of the hellfire garage-rock revival act. Enter the Accident: six men, three guitars, four pairs of sunglasses, one frightful ZZ Top beard, members from hardcore bands Enewetak and Gehenna, and quite a few black lungs. Even their names—Juvencio, Cleveland, Hoss, Hugh, Clayton, Chico—sound like something coughed up on CB radio. Their fans dress like demented lumberjack truckers, all sinew and flannel.
The Accident make music to take trucker speed to, although most everyone knows the only people who really take trucker speed are geeky college kids looking to pull all-nighters while convincing themselves they're asthmatic.
Fuck them! The Accident would! The Accident would fuck them and the horse they rode in on! The Accident would beat the living shit out of them!
“I think they're bruisers,” offered a friend who thinks he heard it from someone else who thinks he heard it from someone else, which is good enough for us. They sure look like it. The Orange-based band look tough and angry and pissed and like they drive large vehicles. It would be really funny if it turned out they drove Miatas. But I just bet they don't. I bet they drive big monster trucks, and I bet they're constantly rolling down their windows and spitting out of them. The growly singer—Hoss Jenkins, he of the imposing frizzy beard and beer-soaked gravelly voice—must constantly be coughing shit up. He would do well to speak with my grammar school music teacher, the one who gave a big presentation on how to sing in a way that's most soothing to your vocal cords for fear of one day building polyps. You're not even supposed to clear your throat when you feel like you need to! You're just supposed to swallow!
Does Hoss know this? Does he even care? Of course he doesn't! He's not about saving his vocal cords, or vocal folds, as they're referred to in the vocal-fold trade. He's not some candy-assed vocal-fold-saving geek! He's about singing in a band and looking like a trucker and being all tough and shit! He's a suburban cowboy! He says it plainly on the muscular “Hog Wild” from the band's thick-riff-laden, self-titled debut: “Hog Wild born of evil desire/My daddy was a devil like an angel of fire. . . . Ride high like an angel on the wind/Insane devil angel on the road/I can't stop now or I'll breathe my dying breath/Born to ride in life as well as death.”
See? He's about devils and angels and riding and being dead and being alive and breathing and being evil and stuff! But if anyone tries to tell you that the Accident are about straight-up rock with no pretensions, they deserve to be bitch-slapped because the Accident are about as straight-up as Nashville Pussy and the Murder City Devils (from whom they borrow heavily in both aesthetic and thematic content), which is to say the whole thing is bershtick. The whole point of this Second Coming of butt rock is that it's entertaining and wild and over-the-top and kitschy. Just don't tell Hoss that because I think he really would kick your ass.
The Accident play NovemberFest at the Hub Caf, 124 E. Commonwealth Ave., Fullerton, (714) 871-2233. Sun., 7 p.m. Free. All ages.
