Clearview Records (original release), June 28, 2020 (digital re-release)
Sack throw together a buzzing party record.
Sack were an in-between band. Following the original demise of The Lillingtons and prior to the original formation of Teenage Bottlerocket, former Lillingtons Cory Laurence, Zachary Rawhouser, and Kody Templeman (also future Bottlerocket) got together with Bottlerocket drummer Brandon Carlisle and recorded this one-off record, Get Wrecked. It’s a completely tossed-off party record, loaded with drunk fun and singalongs, and now it’s been digitally re-released.
Sack doesn’t do much that’s unexpected. The music is mostly simple primed punk rock barreling ahead with no regard for nuance nor punk rock interlopers. For example, “One Helluva Party” plays some Ramonescore riffs real fast and runs them through with a dark edge and enough paranoid desperation in the vocals to let everyone know that the party’s fallen apart. Likewise, “Stag Time” and “The Classic” both rip, digging into aggressive riffs and crashing and bashing drums. Kody’s almost desperate vocals from “One Helluva Party” also come back on “The Classic”, maybe my favorite vocals on Get Wrecked. And songs like “King Of The Beach”, “Roach Clip”, and “Let’s Get Blind” wing it with nasty guitars that will plant a flag in your brain. Again, none of it’s new, but it destroys.
The songs on Get Wrecked have a real unrestrained feel, maybe like Kody just wrote whatever dumb ideas popped into his head rather than trying to hold on to the spy/Cold War/B-movie themes the Lillingtons were all about. And my favorites have some of the most fun words in punk rock. “Pimp Got Stuck” tells an absolutely dumb story of a pimp getting stiffed and picking a dumb fight. Later, “Ticos Taco House” rambles about some burrito hot sauce that makes him feel alive. Even better, “Rad Biker” sings about the guy who’s “poppin’ wheelies with the greatest of ease” and “spinnin’ donuts like a Texas tornado”. And my favorite, “The Headbanger”, just tosses them out right and left. From “everybody had poofy hairdos” to “this guy came in the room looking like the ghost of Cliff Burton”, it’s gold. But I’m pretty sure my favorite line is “someone asked if i was in the KISS army and I said ‘what the fuck you talking about?’”, sung in a fantastic “get out of here” sort of way.
All that said, there are a couple of Get Wrecked songs that drag just a bit. “The Born Loser” is this sort of slow, chugging song telling a story about a guy who “don’t give a fuck”, but it sounds like it’s coming from the voice of a regrettable addict. Maybe that’s what the song is going for, but it brings me down when most of the rest of this stuff is dumb wild fun. “Pool Party” fits a humdrum description as well. The vocal cadences almost drag and it ends up sounding like a band that got super drunk before going on at some backyard party. But really, for a record that feels like a bit of a tossed off lark, it’s sort of incredible that only a couple of the songs throw me off.
Get Wrecked is pretty much front-to-back goodness. It’s simple and dumb and loaded with great songs. What more can you ask for? Interesting side note: though the personnel on the record is seemingly pretty Lillingtons-heavy, the Sack sound seems (to these ears) to be a lot closer to future Teenage Bottlerocket records than Backchannel Broadcast or Death By Television.
You might like this if:
- You like the Ramones-y punk of Lillingtons and Teenage Bottlerocket
You might not if:
- You never got into the fun goodness of these Wyoming punks (and boy do I feel sorry for you if that’s the case)
ryan is a reviewer and news editor for TGEFM. He’s very secretive, he might be an alien.
