Record of the Week: ADD/C Busy Days LP
This record came out at the tail end of 2010 and made it onto my top ten list of the year, so you already know that I love it. Busy Days is everything I’ve ever wanted out of Chattanooga, Tennessee’s ADD/C in their ten (give or take) years of existence. Even though I loved every second of their last LP, I felt that it suffered at times from laziness and not giving a fuck. There are some glaring wrong notes and bad takes on that record. I know that they recorded it at home and could’ve fixed it, but they didn’t. We’re in the present now and this LP is flawless, full of songs that are thoughtful, sincere, depressing and make me want to flail myself around a room full of punks. I’ve never been able to compare ADD/C to any other bands besides themselves, which is fucking awesome. They fall into that gray area (not unlike the BANANAS) where they take the basic elements of jangly punk and filter it through their own region, their own style, and mirror what is going on in their own community while eschewing corporate influence and creeping monoculture. The result is a damn fine record that is less like another LP to add to the heap, but more like a triumph for the punks (the jangly pop ones, anyway). This are songs for the End Times with lyrics like “Where are we gonna sleep? What are we gonna eat? / When all the cars are just useless metal heaps?” and “I’ll never get to Heaven because I don’t believe there is one.” I could go on for days. The record comes with a beautiful full-sized zine/lyric booklet drawn by Heather Lacey and Billy Joe Johnson. The cover art is the most beautiful I’ve seen in years and if bands are not banging down Yuri’s (the artist) door in France and begging her to draw anything for their goddamn pitiful band, this world is fucked. (Mauled by Tigers / Plan-It-X South)
