Shit’s pretty grim these days. Let’s listen to some Fastbacks. It won’t make the world better, but at least the soundtrack for the horrors will kick ass.
Punk is music birthed in long-running, roiling social crisis. It is therefore congenitally well-suited to give comfort in like these. I’ve said before that all good punk bands are trying to answer the question “okay, shit’s fucked, now what?” The best give, if not solutions, at least aesthetic survival guides.
I love a band without pretension. I think the earnestness that Fastbacks have brought to their music over their forty-plus year career is part of not only of their charm, but their power. When they are goofy, there’s no sense of artifice or cynical deflection about it. They seem to genuinely love music in a pure-hearted way that’s bound to lead to some good-natured dopeyness once in awhile.
This single, from their 2024 comeback record For WHAT Reason!, shows off this goofy air. It also proves that the Fastbacks still have their punk magic intact, even though this is their first album released in the 21st century.
Fastbacks’ strategy for survival has always relied on a fair amount of whimsy. I think I first fell in love them as a dorky kid in high school hearing “Gone to the Moon” for the first time. I was just falling madly in love with the form of the short, punchy punk song, which felt so much more urgent than the prosaic, 4-minute radio pop I was used to. I coveted “Gone to the Moon”, even as I remember wishing that it was longer. I wanted there to be more than one minute and fifty seconds of it.
While I still think the song is a straight up jam, I’m also struck by how trenchant its whimsical anti-Capitalism feels now. “Someday, when one guy in the world finally owns every coin / And when I'm sure that he's not thinking of me / When he says, ‘Hi there, I really am your friend’”
I don’t actually have much to say about “In the Summer” that you can’t get from just listening to it. It is, ultimately, a simple song. The only exception really comes from the Kurt Bloch’s anthemic guitar work. It lends a power and chaos to the song that adds some complexity to its otherwise pure, uncomplicated joy.
Summer is my least favorite season but when I listen to “In the Summer”, I can get some of the appeal secondhand. The innocent, schoolkid glee is just too infectious. That second-hand appreciation is testament to the emotional resonance of Fastbacks’ joyous flavor of punk.
This last video is just a little bit of Seattle punk history that I found charming. It was filmed not far from where I currently live in Belltown, and was filmed a few years before I was born. It gave me a strange, impossible nostalgia for the early years of a band that I’ve loved for much of my life, even though they predate my very existence. A strange sort of reverse hauntology, I suppose.