Man, I'd have to reach deep into the old memory hole to recall a Chicago band quite as youthfully impish, snake-armed, and hard-headedly catchy as Tuff Sudz on their debut LP (eponymously titled?) Tough Suds. Rooting around, I can scope Twin Peaks's Wild Onion out of the dirt plot of my personal recollection, although Twin Peaks never managed to be quite as amusingly petulant in their execution or as diverse in their aesthetic approaches or styles. For example, the floor-boards cracking stomp and tainted bubble-tar-clap of "No Time for Love" spins out in the cracked groove of a Dictators' b-side until it rolls over into a full-throttle Rick Nielsen fret-peeler while extolling a parabole of a guy who likes getting high more than he can be bothered to see his wife and kids- it's villainously deranged and dumbfounding in its conceits, but I'll be damned if it doesn't crease my lips with grim mirth between bouts of throwing my body into a lurching headbang. Tough Suds is uniform and consistent in this way, whirling though-in-cheek anthems that operate at the intellectual level of glass-chewing and fork-socket-mining that none-the-less sublate the gutter of their inspirations to achieve a sort of alienate honesty soaked in pitch-hued comic strife. In a thematically analogous form to Pissed Jeans and other self-aware hardcore acts of the '10s, the through line of their Phil Lynott ringed hooks and fog of leaky, Agent Orange-esque tainted-grooves, sneering Undertones odes, and servings of dust-huffing country-sludge is an unflappable observance of the grimy vanity that coats our obligations and obsessions, whether they be self-improvement, gainful employment, fealty to family or the snare of our vices, and greets them all as the express horizon where heaven bears down at hell and hell pushes back with smoldering girth and fury. The rough soak of their harlequin parcels of woe is a grinning acceptance life, not as we'd like it to be, but as it is, and finding a delirious glimmer of joy in its obstinant refusal to accommodate us and our inability to rise to its overbearing challenges... It's also just a good ass rock record. Simple as.
