Somehow Chase USA's
Honey Baby: I Love When You Call Me hit last year and bounced clean over my head in an arching leap like a superball tossed off a high school gym room- it made its impact on Earth and then completely cleared my field of vision while I'm left blindly staring at the sun, frying my retinas and wondering what the hell all the commotion is about. Luckily, their most recent EP
Child Rebel Soldier came at me like a warning shot, hissing and shaving my eyebrows, imposing its presence with searing intensity. Perhaps the reason why
CRS has arrived in my purview with such stinging clarity is due to its focused nature.
CRS, as opposed to
Honey Baby, is a more explicitly coded hip hop album, while
Honey Baby, beneath all its layers of burnish and ambition, was a pop-punk project at heart. On
CRS, Chase USA continues to display a sharp eye for production and an incredible instinct for dynamics and catch-and-release rhythms, carried over form his previous efforts, while thematically and stylistically, it's less a mash-up of the past twenty years of punk and emo canon with an experiential twist, and more Chase's version of
good kid, m.A.A.d city, a hyper-real panoramic sound exhibition that examines the author's adolescence being reared in the junkyard of decay rotting below the pretenses of the American dream, and drawing out how such circumstances have necessitated the extremity of growing up fast, hungry, and ready to stand on business, as if every day was a fresh battlefield in a war of attrition that plays out over a lifetime. If you can't dodge the hard knocks, it's obligatory that you knock back twice as hard, ideally with the punching cycle of a Thompson submachine gun.
