The cover to
On Mars
, the second album from Portland party-punks
Mean Jeans
, features a cartoon of the guys flying through the cosmos in a spaceship made from a bottle of Jagermeister, while passing through clouds of macaroni en route to the red planet. Add song titles like "Total Yo-Yo," "I'm a Pile," "School Lunch Victim," and "Don't Stop Partying," and you'd get the not inaccurate idea that this band doesn't take much seriously (besides getting wasted). But one spin of
makes clear that there's one thing these guys hold sacred --
the Ramones
. Thousands of bands have tried to follow the template of the brothers from Forest Hills, but
not only bash their guitars and write hooky but skeletal melodies much like
, lead singer
Billy Jeans
even tries to replicate the Noo Yawk twang of
Joey Ramone
's vocals (with various degrees of success), while drummer
Jeans Wilder
occasionally makes with scrappy harmony vocals not unlike
Dee Dee
.
lacks
Johnny
's skills as a guitarist, and has to use various bits of trash rock riffage to compensate for the fact that he can't downstroke with the relentless force of his role model. It's also obvious that while
could sound sincere while pouring out stuff like this when they felt like it,
wouldn't know sincerity if they ended up spending the night with it after sharing an eight ball backstage. This band's commitment to concept is strong, and these songs are written and performed with enough skill to suggest that, like
, they're actually pretty smart and have a genuine gift for playing dumb. If
had any goals besides rocking out and convincing us they're raving burnouts, who knows what they might accomplish; as it is,
is good fun, but not so good that you can ignore the empty feeling you get when it's all over. ~ Mark Deming