Replay: Jawbreaker, Unfun, 1990

Jawbreaker did punk-pop the way Mother Nature never intended: with a viscerality and fierce intelligence that, arguably, was just a more lively version of the infant genre known as "emo" then gestating in the freeze-dried hearts of East Coast acts such as Fugazi. Which makes the title of Jawbreaker's debut album all the more ironic: Unfun, while fairly introspective and thoughtful, is anything but unfun. Rather, the record fortified punk's rigid stomp with romp--a sense of added dimension in the form of novel musical textures, ambitious melodies and lyrics that were born of more than a 12-pack and a blowout with a green-haired girlfriend. Blake Schwarzenbach's bullfrog growl makes him sound wise beyond his years, and his use of guitar--a quivering, chiming, groaning voice in itself--is raw but judicious. This striking musical maturity would be criticized as undue tameness by nose-pierced purists on the one hand; on the other, the Jawbreaker formula would also be dosed with plenty of milk and sugar and sold to the Hot Topic masses in the form of Green Day. So, maybe Jawbreaker is some vestigial limb of punk rock destined to wither; fortunately, a healthy community of fans makes its earlier stuff not impossible to find. The band's catalog is a mixed bag, but Unfun remains a bundle of catchy squall that bounds with the sweet venom of youth. The bounding "Want" cracks the album wide open; other songs fill the space with all their scraggled joy and angst, from the yearning tumble of "Busy" to closing anthem "Gutless." The sweaty sheen of Unfun proved that punk didn't have to choose between gravity and frivolity--seriousness of content could live quite comfortably with the joy of perfect execution. If Jawbreaker knew anything, it was this. As Schwarzenbach sings on "Incomplete:" "You keep saying you're just killing time/ Well be careful, you're killing some of mine."--Andrew Kiraly