It's always a pleasure to dip back into my roots and see what's going on in garage punk land. I recall when I picked up Live & Dangerous II back in 2021 and how blown away I was by it- twenty minutes of pure, unrestrained and consequence-free disaster that left my brain feeling like a dead gerbil left clinging to a still-rotating exercise wheel. Now I don't and can't go a week without thinking about that band.* My most recent find from the tool-self-bracketed and beer-saturated carpeted dens of America's regional underground is Drew Owen's Heaven is No Fun, released under the nom-de-plume Sick Thoughts. Drew has that classic kind of scuzzy, filth-flecked punk vibe to him- husky, greasy, and slightly grizzled, he's gracefully afflicted with a bit of Bruce Willis syndrome, where he looks like a handsome guy in his mid-40s while having hardly passed through his mid-20s. His disheveled persona is reflected directly by his music as well, electrically animating a kind of Johnny Thunders composite, shorn up with scraps and hypotheses conspicuously purloined from the secret journals of the Scientists. The homely, street slime-painted, haggard swagger of Heaven is No Fun's recreational gas-huffing, back-alley smack-up has enough downtown, gutter-trawling credence to breathe life into the soundtrack of a full film adaptation of some script that floated to the bottom of John Water's desk drawer in the late '70s, where it has been festering as a minor mecca for grime and malign pathogens like a porkchop that had been kicked under the fridge and forgotten. Derranged little ditties like "Mother I Love Satan" hurl out declarations of pure feeling and affection for the enemy, like Joey Ramone revealing his beguiling intentions in "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend," but instead of remaining steady in his delivery, Drew's confessions of iniquitous infatuation becoming more cutting and devout the longer the see-sawing, bawl of the accompanying power chords are allowed to continue their pendulum-like slash. "Smash The Mirror" is a heedless clash of ego-shattering, trouble-mustering, make-shift exit music that will help you punch through to the second half of the LP, where you will find the black-and-blues-y, chopper barrage of "Submachine Love," the sensitive, faithfully slanted, and oddly Ergs-y love-lark "Someone I Can Talk To," and hard-staring, groovey grumble of closer "Rich Kid." Sick Thoughts make heaven look like a dentist's waiting room. Don't RSVP to the pearly gates until you see what's happening in the basement first.
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