Jawbreaker, Unfun (2010 Remastered Edition)
Featured Album
Proof that hardcore intensity and indie catchiness are actually complimentary
Jawbreaker's sound has become such a part of the modern rock landscape that it might be tough for new fans to understand how surprising their music (and their success) felt in the early '90s. "Pop-punk" had yet to become a mainstream phenomenon and "emo" was more of an epithet than a genre. Driven underground in the '80s, punk ruthlessly enforced a set of rules designed to exclude pop tourists. In 1990, the year of Unfun, Jawbreaker's first album, dogmatic hardcore still ruled. Bands that dared to "go soft" were banished to the land of indie rock, where such things were acceptable — even encouraged. But Jawbreaker realized that hardcore intensity and indie catchiness were actually complimentary. (If that sounds like a no-brainer now, well, guess you had to be there.) And so, along with a handful of brave D.I.Y. peers scattered across the country, Jawbreaker decided to put this near-heretical theory into practice.
Unfun was the result, and it was an unqualified success. Instead of the relentless thud of hardcore, Jawbreaker's rhythm section plays with a surprising fluidity and invention. Bassist Chris Bauermeister might just be the band's secret weapon, popping with melody while pushing the music forward. But it's singer-guitarist Blake Schwarzenbach who turned Jawbreaker into a near-religion for a generation of bookish, proudly brokenhearted kids. A romantic with an appropriately jaundiced view of love song cliches, a litterateur who abhorred pretension, Schwarzenbach could snarl "I want you" without coming off cloying, and make a line like "deep red welts from hating myself" sound like self-recrimination rather than self-pity. He wrote punk songs you could slip onto mixtapes for your punk-hating friends ("Seethruskin"). And pop songs for kids who'd rather cut themselves than switch on the radio ("Wound"). Jawbreaker's best work was undoubtedly still ahead of them. But they'd never again play with the same enthusiasm — the sound of three kids amazed that they'd come up with something so singular — and two decades later that enthusiasm is as impossible to ignore.
