New Music of the Day – CCV: Not My President – Squished Penises

We’ll just skip over the bands backstory for now, tales of alien abduction and cryogenic freezing all make for fun punk mythologies but let’s get down to the task at hand. What punk has always been the perfect vehicle for is making statements, political, social, artistic, the blunter and more direct the better, rather than worrying too much about how slickly it is packaged, musically speaking. To some it is just a case of shock and awful, to me it is the most succinct way of making a point, a sucker punch to the brain, a sledgehammer to the modern bland collective consciousness.

Squished Penises operate in that that 1977 “just do it” punk attitude that was coming out of London art colleges, Berlin squats and hustling for change on the Lower East Side at the time, the straight up three cacophonous chords and a whole lot of the terrible truth that seems to now be resigned to the past. It is raw, rowdy and riotous, it is about impact and ideology, revolution and resistance, reaction and rebellion. And, it would seem, alliteration!

I’ve often wondered why when significant musical movements such as rock’n’roll, punk and hip-hop have been born out of social unrest, why there hasn’t been something new born as a sounding board for the turmoil and injustice of this decade. Until it happens we always have bands such as Squished Penises to lead the charge, and for that I thank them.