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World War IX - Phoning It In (Emergency Breakthru Records) Album Review
Released by: Emergency Breakthru
Released on: May, 2021.
Purchase From The World War IX Website
It's been a while, but NYC's own World War IX are back, this time with a new 10†EP and a new lead vocalist, following up 2015's If One Of These Bottles Should Happen To Fall EP.! The skinny, smelly looking flexible guy named Filthy Phill is gone, replaced by new guy Johnny Celentano (formerly of New Jersey's Citizen Blast Kane), who sounds a good bit like a younger Keith Morris and fits in with WWIX's established sound pretty much perfectly. That comparison isn't a bad thing at all, as this band wears their influences on their collective sleeve, pulling from bands like The Circle Jerks, early Black Flag, Sloppy Seconds, Dead Kennedys and other stalwarts of the sound.
The EP, which runs roughly eight-minutes from start to finish, opens with Fired For Partying - which is a song about, well, it's pretty self-explanatory. It's also catchy as fuck and a really solid way to open up their first new recording in quite a few years. Mike Moosehead on lead guitar, ably assisted by J. Melkmann (who also did the cover art and occasionally puts out really cool comic books about his life in the band that are definitely worth checking out if you dig indie/underground/alternative comic stuff) on rhythm, slays here, the mix puts the guitars right up front.
With Coke Machine, the up the speed limit with a sixty-six rager about the efforts a caffeine addict will go to in order to get his 'fix of legal speed.' It's got a neat slower, instrumental section that lasts a few seconds towards the end but it ends with the same blasting intensity that it started with.
The third track, Larry's House, is about what happens at the home of someone named Larry who doesn't have a chance, wets his bed and shits his pants. Also Johnny sounds like he doesn't want to be a dad. Larry sounds like he needs to get his life together. Either way, if Larry's got problems this song doesn't, it's pretty much straight up punk rock perfection.
The longest song on the record is the two-and-a-half-minute Portrait Of Sobriety - positively epic by the standards of this band! It's another solid track, with Jon Kleinman's drum work and Brian Jackson's bass playing doing a strong job of anchoring the track while the two guitar players and Celentano's vocals get to go off the rails a bit.
NYC Tonight is a singalong anthem, the kind that you can figure out the lyrics to in a matter of seconds and immediately get into. It's a pretty straight forward track about raising Hell in NYC, something that, during the last year or so due to Covid-19 restrictions, a lot of people have probably seriously missed doing, what with the bars closed and live shows off limits. Either way, it is, like every other track on this record, seriously strong - and it's also a G.G. Allin cover (it was on his No Rules EP from 1982)!
Produced, recorded, engineered, mixed and mastered by Jesse Cannon at Sound Foundation in Brooklyn, NY, the album sounds exactly like you'd want a snotty punk record to sound. It's raw without sounding like crap, capturing the band's scrappy energy really nicely. Pick this up, you won't be disappointed.
