Los Angeles quartet the Bronx will bring their hard-hitting brand of fiery punk rock to the Sun God festival with an early slot on the side stage. Like an angrier Rocket from the Crypt, the Bronx bring caffeinated tempos and brash, political lyrics to crunchy guitars for an energetic, intense and distinctly Los Angeles take on modern punk.
Mosh-pit lovers read: Show up for this band to get your shove on, because they have fire. James Tweedy, Joby J. Ford, Matt Caughthran and Jorma Vik formed the Bronx in 2002 over an apparent love of fast tempos and loud guitars. The band was flooded with record company attention after only two gigs, but decided to hone their sound at a distance from the fast lane to stardom.
Limiting themselves to only three takes, the Bronx record all their releases live, and usually in friends’ living rooms. They believe that this is the truest path to “music,” shying away from the million-dollar studio environments other bands are supposedly recording “punk rock” in.
The Bronx bristles with three parts thrash-punk and one part stadium rock. Ex-Guns N’ Roses guitarist Gilby Clarke helped the band record parts of the album, which explains the wall of meaty guitar that insistently shapes most of its songs (and sounds straight out of “Welcome to the Jungle”). Drummer Jorma Vik sounds like he’s banging on a colossal drum kit, his kick/snare interchanges rising gloriously above the mix. Vocalist Matt Caughthran has a gripping scream, and we get to hear it a lot. His desperate vocalizations seem at the edge of madness, as if he were burning alive every moment you hear his voice.
Most of the songs are just super-fast three-chord numbers, but a few studio tricks elaborate the guitar and drum parts by providing contrary motion to particularly repetitive parts. There’s little variation between the songs, but we can let that slide — this is punk rock, after all, and no one in the pit cares about variation. But to their credit, the Bronx make attempts to keep things interesting with atonal detours up and down the fretboard to make us feel more strung out.
While they certainly owe allegiance to the old world of hedonistic L.A. rock ’n’ roll, the Bronx thrash with a message. Many of their songs have political themes or purposes, and though their lyrics are of simple craft (“We’ve got a cancer / Looking for the answer”), they’re often very punk (like when, at the end of “Heart Attack American,” Caughthran shouts “there is no revolution” repeatedly, as hard as his voice will let him).
The Bronx try to steal a bit of the Hollywood grime for themselves, and though it’s not always clear if they want to be Black Flag or G N’ R, they do a good job of recalling the sinful excess of the midnight boulevard and translating it into sound. The Bronx, like Los Angeles, are always in your face with something new for you to handle — and if you’re up for it, as the denizens of that impassioned city will testify, the reward can be great.
