Send "Jawbreaker " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 San Francisco's Jawbreaker straddled a pivotal moment when emo was a "core": halfway between insult and genre, hardcore and pop, underground and mainstream. Their lyrics stressed both punk principles and emotional outpourings. Their music was furious but catchy, with a set of mannerisms that flowed smoothly into indie-rock, pop-punk, and alt-rock: palm-muted power chords laced with bright octaves and harmonics; guitar leads rounding off into whistling feedback; counter-melodic bass lines; and epic breakdowns with arty sampled monologues. They had lofty ideals, but their songs walked around on the streets, sullen and pissed, with fresh scabs and dog-eared volumes of Bukowski in their back pockets.The phrase "emo-core" itself is a problematic compromise between hardcore and pop-- an angst-inducing identity for a young band. Blake Schwarzenbach was 22 when Jawbreaker's 1990 debut, Unfun, came out, and this was but one of the pressures that drove him. Recriminating tunefully through a shredded throat, he calibrated himself against a punk scene and adult world of coequal injustice. Unfun was Jawbreaker's punkest record, but he feared it wasn't punk enough: "Sorry we ain't hard enough to piss your parents off," he snipped on "Incomplete". His fretful intelligence often led him to dispense free psychological evaluations and strawman parables. There are many issues-based songs: "Softcore" is anti-porn, and "Seethruskin" is anti-racism. It gets almost Orwellian: "Don't think that I ain't counting all the things you do," Schwarzenbach bristles in scene-cop mode. (He always loved those sassy "ain'ts.") To that extent, the record earns its title....full text |
| Interpunk. |
| The beloved 1990 debut album from emo pioneers and bittersweet punk rock darlings Jawbreaker. Sixteen classic tracks. Upcoming B-sides and rarities compilation to be re-released July 2002 on the band's own Blackball imprint....full text |
| Daily-reviews |
| In 1990, Jawbreaker — a Bay Area pop-punk trio featuring Blake Schwarzenbach (guitars/vocals), Adam Pfahler (drums) and Chirs Bauermeister (bass) — released their debut album, Unfun. Their mix of deceptively sweet melodies, unrelenting power and Schwarzenbach’s punk-Bukowsi lyricism made them one of the most influential groups of the ’90s, and their fingerprints are all over much of the rock that took over mainstream radio in the mid-2000s. We talked to Schwarzenbach and Pfahler about the reissue of Unfun (out this week), Jawbreaker’s legacy and the band’s future. Grab a download of Unfun’s “Gutless” at the end of the post (and hear it right here!): Does listening to this album take you back to where you were when you were making it? Pfahler: Yeah, it was nostalgic for me. But the nostalgia was a bit short-lived. I had to listen to the stuff really obsessively because I was working on the remastering process. Schwarzenbach: I hadn’t listened to it since it came out. I’ve always found it pretty challenging to listen to stuff that I’ve recorded. [Unfun] is so dense and, I would say, overwritten, but not in a critical way. It’s such dense music that I’m astounded that we were doing that. There’s the cliché that bands wait their entire lives to make their first record and when that opportunity comes they pour absolutely everything into it. Schwarzenbach: That was the feeling in the band, that we only had that one record. And it was such a rare thing to make an album that we went at it pretty intensely. Jawbreaker is heavily associated with the Bay Area punk scene, but Unfun was largely written while you were at college in New York, right, Blake? Schwarzenbach: I wrote a lot of those songs on 16th street and 3rd Ave. We kind of quickly arranged them into band form over a Christmas break. About seven of them were started or written in my apartment. I think if anything, those songs have a kind of New York desperation to them. Is there anything about Unfun that you wish could’ve been done differently? Pfahler: The first album is pretty dense and energetic; you can hear the energy no matter what. By the time you get to [final album] Dear You, we had months to spend in the studio. Schwarzenbach: I think there was only the one way to make Unfun: with limited abilities and unlimited enthusiasm. The recordings have a certain knotted energy....full text |
Jawbreaker lyrics
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