At long last, in this increasingly rambling and autobiographical review of what may or may not be the best 500 albums ever produced, we get to a topic I can really sink my teeth into.
The music with which one most identifies is a major topic of conversation amongst the young, which means that the most common phrase I heard during my sixth form days could well have been "but you don't look like a punk". Actually, it's much harder to not look like a punk than they thought. Like any artistic movement worth it's salt, punk has a philosophy bolted onto it, but like any musical genre worth thorough exploration, the philosophy and the material often only loosely hang together. To limit punk is not punk. "Question everything" does not mean "question everything so long as you're dangling safety pins from your mohawk". I never understood why they never understood.
Punk is not about ring-fencing itself, it's about knocking down as many other fences as possible just to see what happens. That's what makes the truly great punk albums such eclectic grab-bags of ideas and approaches. Why else did the Clash finish up the joyfully eclectic nineteen-track London's Calling and say to themselves "we'd better make sure the next album's got some real variety to it"?
New Day Rising burst five years later from a similar ethos. Want straight-up punk rock? Try "Folk Lore". Want to see why REM cite Husker Du as a major influence (and see how Idlewild's early days were sketched out a full decade earlier? Check out "I Apologize". Curious to hear the band accidentally inventing Yo La Tengo's entire career? "Perfect Example" is the cut for you! And all of that is on the disc's first side.
So too is the ridiculously simple but ridiculously charged "New Day Rising". It takes chops Joe Strummer would have been proud of to not just name an album after the idea of forging a new dawn, but the lead-off track as well, and then not even bothering to write any lyrics for it other than "New day rising!!!" over and over. The mid '80s were never the creative wasteland they're so often described as, but with a culture obsessed with thoughtless avarice and a music scene chained to synthesiser banks the size of small cliff faces, Husker Du's third album promises a great deal.
It almost delivers.
The biggest problem with this "try anything" approach - as the Clash discovered - is that there's only so much casting around for new directions before you start to lose a tight grip on quality control. The first side of New Day Rising could probably stand to lose "If I Told You" without anyone being too upset, but it's the second half that causes real problems. " 59 Times The Pain" is exactly the kind of uninspired trudge through distorted guitars Husker Du's "hardcore punk" label would suggest, and the final four tracks manage between them to utterly kill dead the album's momentum. "I Don't Know What You're Talking About" is a respectable enough slice of punk, strangely paced though it occasionally is, but "How To Skin A Cat" weds fascinatingly disturbing lyrics to an utterly unbearable backing track (which may have been the point, but that doesn't really help), and both "Whatcha Drinkin'" and "Plans I Make" are merely formless shoutalongs.
It's not as though the tail end of the disc is without merit. "Terms Of Psychic Warfare" brilliantly charts the course halfway between The Clash and Bob Dylan, using a Wurlitzer as a compass, and the two-punch combo of the spectral-but-muscular "Powerline" and the barroom stomp "Books About UFOs" is remarkably effective. There's a tremendously strong (if very short) ten-track album in here, and even at twelve tracks you'd have something very tight. Ultimately, though, as with Sandinista! four years earlier and Rancid's Life Won't Wait a decade and change later, the sprawl of invention eventually causes the bottom to fall out.
But hey. Not fucking around with punk to the maximum extent is not punk. If Brand New Day can't claim to be one of the best punk albums, it can certainly be regarded as an album of punk at its best.
Seven and a half tentacles.
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