Retro Music Review

Recently I’ve been dealing with my midlife crisis by exploring all the music I loved in my youth. Of course, some of this music has held up pretty well despite my current standards, while some of this music sounds pretty dated. The top 40 music I so loved as a teen isn’t really what I enjoy now, though some of the album rock I listened to in college is still quite amazing and relevant. The general idea is to review albums as a whole, though I might review certain songs on their own, or perhaps certain artists. The first album I want to review is certainly on the obscure side: the self-titled, and only, release by a band called “PassAFist.  Some might say that Dave Perkins and Lynn Nichols actually set out to make the second Chagall Guevara album with the Passafist project. The first track, Emmanuel Chant, feels like a post industrial dance number. The song almost sounds like if Trent Reznor wrote a song with MC 900 Ft. The second track, Glock is a heavy and violent song speaking of vengeance. The  speaker in this song is an English teacher, who due to a school shooting, turns to a life of violence. My interpretation is that the song revolves around an egoist who decides to follow the example of Christ, minus the love. Track 4, Love E900 is a commentary of the culture that, before the internet, arose around 1-900 numbers. You could call for psychics,  you could call for phone sex, you could call for jokes, financial advice, and pretty much anything you might now just google. I’ve always felt that this was the weakest track on the album, but that doesn’t mean it’s a weak song by any means. One must ask why Passafist, an album which talks about so many evils – violence, corruption, greed, and heresy, would include this specific cover.