A CHORUS OF DISAPPROVAL: Arrested Development Is More Than A TV Show For Overeducated Twits
My old-fart appreciation for Hardcore records I more or less dismissed in my younger years is something that’s bothered me for the past few decades, even though it’s something I can explain pretty quickly. Now stripped of pointless scene politics and the overall smugness of being a know-nothing kid, I can take them in and enjoy them for what they are: ferocious-sounding creations made by well-meaning kids who had a penchant for silly lyrics. The recently reissued debut album from Southern California’s A Chorus Of Disapproval Truth Gives Wings To Strength is a prime example of all that crap I just spewed up there in those other sentences.
Before ever hearing Chorus, I got a handwritten letter from the bands’ guitarist Jeff Banks in the fall of 1990. Somewhere he found a copy of the fanzine I co-edited Common Sense and wrote to tell me about his new band and their upcoming visit to the studio promising to send me the results as soon as they were finished. As expected, the tape never showed up in my mailbox. That’s what you get when you gotta music scene run by teenagers.
By the time Truth Gives Wings To Strength was released a year later, I hadn’t really moved on from the whole Straight Edge thing yet, but I definitely had my fill of tough-guy Judge wanna-be bands. And that’s what Chorus qualified as when I first heard them with their lyrics about how “the militant edge is not a joke” and that they were “no sellouts” who were “loyal to the grave”. Instead of the Judge hammers, they had a baseball bat with the word “UGLY” stenciled on it. It all reeked of one-hundred percent Velveeta to me. Having said that, I did record the first side of the album off a friend “Just to laugh at it”. After a few listens, I couldn’t deny the two opening tracks, “No Part” and “Addiction to Disease” although the whole presentation of the band still had me making constant “Who Farted?” faces.
I’d revisit the album here and there when it’d pass through my hands at record stores I worked at along the way and as my apathy grew on the lousier parts of my Hardcore upbringing, the more I grew to like it. I could now giggle at the lyrics, especially my favorite one from the song “Loyal”:
“I’m a needle in a haystack/Fourth leaf on the clover/Don’t let me fall through the cracks, man/OR IT’S OVER!”
The riffs that once sounded like rewrites of ones by the above-mentioned Judge or Raw Deal now seemed pretty convincing; a more apparent version on the covertly Metal aspects of the New York Hardcore sound other Orange County Hardcore bands were also trying to make their own. And having actually listened to the entire album a few times in the past few weeks, I’m shocked at how it holds up as a full-length; especially for a debut album from a band with no prior releases. The pacing of the tracks is consistent and keeps you in full throttle mode making it the perfect soundtrack to a power walk through the haze of tear gas seeping into the neighborhood. And sure, the lyrics are goofy as hell, but aren’t most of them from this era?
Thankfully, the list of records I flipped in favor of from my edge-minn days is scant. You can throw the Chorus debut LP in with stuff like the Journeyman demo and the Unit Pride seven-inch most certainly. But who knows? Gimme some time and you might be in for a five-part analysis of Hardball’s One By One seven-inch if you’re lucky.
Truth Gives Wings to Strength was reissued by the fine folks at Organized Crime Records and you can pick it up from RevHQ as well.
