The Points, The Points

I think I’m overthinking this. I’ve been wrestling with The Points’ self-titled debut for way too long, trying to figure out something pithy to say about the Washington, DC, trio (Geo — guitar/vocals; Cobruh — drums/vocals; Rebecca — um, keyboards? really?), and for the most part, I’ve got not much beyond, “They sound like the Ramones.” Which is true, yeah, but doesn’t really capture The Points as a whole. And the really dumb part of that is that I really, truly like this CD a hell of a lot.

So fuck it — here goes the simplified version: blazing opener “No Girl” grabs you by the neck with its thick-ass, fuzzed-out guitars, driving beat, and punk-chanted vocals, and it doesn’t let go. It sounds like, yes, the Ramones, if the Ramones had been big fans of Hüsker Dü instead of the other way ’round, slathering the Bob Mould wall-of-noise drone all over the track. There’s a melody lurking under there, but it’s sunk six feet deep in the thick guitar roar. Like the Ramones, the Points use their guitars as big hammers on a lot of the songs here, thudding out those fuzzy, half-buried melodies on the first track, the sludgy-yet-melodic “Never Trust My Heart,” and the snarling, self-hating “Feeling Sorry.”

The Points shift things up partway through, however, moving away from the “thick” guitars to more of a straight-ahead garage-rock sound on tracks like “Not Your Man,” “Don’t Care Much,” and the Priestess-esque “I Don’t Know About You.” On these mid-album songs the band comes off more like The Sonics, early Makers, or Sugar Shack, wielding rough-edged riffs like knives to carve away raw, bloody chunks of rawk while the drums do a foreboding stomp in the background and Geo/Cobruh (I honestly can’t tell ’em apart) yelp and shout. Not much melody, no, but just good, old-school garage-rock, which wouldn’t be bad on its own.

I have to admit, though, that I find myself longing to skip backwards to the super-fuzzed fury of “No Girl,” so I breathe a big sigh of relief when “Never Trust My Heart” rolls around. The track signals a melding of the band’s two types of sound into something that works damn well on the last part of the album, with “She’s Gotta Know,” “Test Me Out,” and “P.A.R.T.Y.” incorporating the rawness of the mid-album stuff with the big, thick guitars and camouflaged melodies of the first part.

So, the ultra-simplified version: it’s badass.