The Lawrence Arms/The Chinkees
Present Day Memories  (Asian Man)

originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2003

Armed with a faux-British accent, a punk attack that sounds like Good Charlotte with a sense of history and an irrelevant but funny Simpsons sample, The Lawrence Arms burst through “Quincentuple Your Money” with spunk enough to fill their own non-split EP. There’s not a whole lot going on in the song department, but for their half of Present Day Memories , the Lawrence Arms get their foot in the door, which might buy them enough time to think up a convincing sales pitch for their next go-round. The Chinkees see that punk mania and add one brilliant conceit – hey, why not play an organ like a rhythm guitar instead of, you know, like an organ? – to create a frenzy on “Clouding Up My Storm” and “1980’s Drowning Me” that’s brief enough that nobody need care that nothing much just happened. That organ is put back in its place by the ska tune that soon follows, but it’s ultimately the title track that’s pretty much the only thing I’d really like to hear more of from the Chinkees. It’s a live, solo-acoustic song that sounds, compositionally and vocally, like Squeeze if Glenn Tillbrook were a depressive. It’s as driven and unsettling as the Mountain Goats, and it makes the rest of the songs on Present Day Memories sound like scraps.

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