Review: Naked Raygun – “Over The Overlords”

Wax Trax! Records – 02 Aug 2021

A bit of the old, a bit of the “new,” and some actual new

Over The Overlords as an album is hard to assess without acknowledging what has come before. To say Naked Raygun has had a storied career and was a big part of what created the “Chicago Sound” is an understatement. From their debut Basement Screams EP in 1983 through to their last (or, now, most recent) LP Raygun… Naked Raygun in 1990, the band evolved from noisy post-punk to something more akin to alt-punk, all the while being one of the greatest “whoa oh” bands to ever exist. They truly are one of the best punk acts to come out of Chicago and, listening in on Over the Overlords, for good or ill, it slots fairly well into Naked Raygun’s evolution as band.

This album does a lot of things that Raygun fans are used to. Some songs seem to pull a bit from the band’s Basement Screams or Throb Throb-era: instrumental lead track “Intro,” “Go the Spoils,” and the 6-minute instrumental “Outro Outre.” There’s quite a few of the more slow-tempo, pounding, plodding jazz-fusion songs reminiscent of their middle catalog in “Soul Hole Baby (Robert Mitchum)” and “Black and Grey.” With the rest being a continuation of the latter works, including Raygun… Naked Raygun, 1997’s Last of The Demohicans (which included their, at the time, final four song demo), as well as the 2009-2011 series of three singles the band released via Riot Fest Records.

Now, why is that “for good or ill”?

Well, some fans like the old stuff up to John Haggerty’s departure in 1989 (to co-found other Chicago mainstay Pegboy). And If you’re one of those fans, and still don’t dig the post-Haggerty albums, you might get a bit of the feels on this album but still find it not to your liking. For some people, the band just evolved too far away from the earlier albums. If you’re OK with Naked Raygun’s progression, though, you’ll likely find a lot more to like on this one. There’s a lot of noise (and general weirdness) than we get on their more recent releases (once again, mind you, in the grand scheme of things “more recent” means going back to 1990), but also some more thought out melodies and harmonies, some seem almost pop rock in form, if not style.

And maybe some unintentional influences? Replace lead vocalist Jeff Pezzati’s voice with Black Francis on “Suicide Bomb” and you’d totally have a post-reunification Pixies song. “Treat Me Unkind” is a peppy number with a chorus that owes a lot to The Buzzcocks‘ “I Don’t Mind” (which Raygun covered for their 1997 live, reunion album Free Shit). It’s its own song, but if you know their “I Don’t Mind” cover, you can’t not hear it.

Naked Raygun tends to have at least one song that’s a bit weird and a bit fun. “Amishes” is that song here. It starts out pretty serious until we get to the verse “I’m sick of living like the Amishes / but I must admit, the girls look pretty cute” and then it just loses itself and even goes so far to reference The Partridge Family‘s Susan Day (trust me, it works).

“Ode to Sean McKeough” (Riot Fest founder who suddenly passed away in 2016) works best as a tribute if you know more about the subject himself, but otherwise maybe attempts to twist the lyrics a bit too hard to make them fit.

Penultimate track “Farewell to Arms” leans heavily into classic rock n’ roll, replete with organs, pianos, horns (and not just the regular NR sax) and lots of vocal harmonies before it leads into the previously mentioned noise-centric “Outro Outre.”

Two bonus tracks are tacked on when the album proper is done. The first is a remix by Paul Barker (I’m assuming of Ministry fame) of “Living in The Good Times” which primarily alters Pezzati’s voice, and does something with the drums that, well… sound funny. The other is a 2015 live version of fan favorite “Knock Me Down,” which originally appears on 1996’s All Rise, as well as 1997’s Free Shit live album. I’m not sure what story either bonus song brings to the mix that the other songs don’t already tell. The album version of “Living in The Good Times” sounds miles better than the remix, and there are better live recordings of “Knock Me Down” out there, too. I guess just like how Highlander II: The Quickening doesn’t exist, these songs aren’t really a part of Over the Overlords for me.

In the end, what do we have? An album that lifetime Naked Raygun fans (of the old and the “new”) are probably going to want to check out. In our digital age the purchase hesitant can give it a streaming go and decide if they want to take the plunge with their wallet (I imagine the vinyl will sell nicely), while others might just want to buy hearing unheard (is that a phrase? if not, why?), if only to continue to support a band that many, oh so many of us, literally grew up listening to.

For those who may have missed the NR train up to this point: that’s a trickier thing for me to determine. Having such a history of listening to this band (quite literally almost 3/4s of my life), I can’t quite tell how this album will fall on the uninitiated ears. That’s just the thing about Naked Raygun: Sure, they fell into the “punk” category probably more because they couldn’t be classified along the lines of other mainstream music at the time. But they’ve always brought something else and something new to the table with each subsequent release, to the point that there’s just about something for everyone somewhere in their discography. Who knows, this album may be that something for those who’ve never heard the band?

Either way, Over the Overlords marks the end of an era as it is the last to feature long-time bassist Pierre Kezdy, who died of cancer in October 2020. A giant among musicians, his work on this album is his final contribution to the Naked Raygun pantheon.