The Donnybrook Writing Academy

Most Likely To: make you want to beat a cop.

Last night I dreamed that I was browsing a store that doesn’t really exist but one modeled on the many stores in Manhattan’s Lower East Side where you can buy cheaply silkscreened t-shirts for acts like The Adicts and The Damned. In addition to those revered staples of the late punk and early hardcore scenes, the racks were boasting plenty of tees for Bum Kon, a Denver hardcore act that recorded a record in 1983 that was never released. It says something about the quality of Bum Kon’s music that I had this unconscious bit of lionization, cementing the band alongside other powerhouses of the era.

Fortunately for archivists, the musically curious, and fans of the scene, the band (whom I mentioned briefly a few weeks ago) has finally been given a chance to share this record with the world a quarter century after the fact thanks to Colorado’s Smooch Records. Drunken Sex Sucks is nothing short of an assault–a self-mutilating, drunken fight of a record. More importantly, it is also an album with a sense of humor, a fact that helps mediate the immediacy of the raucous sounds and short track lengths. In the liner notes there is a reproduction of the album art for the band’s debut single, “Drunken Sex Sucks.” In it, two speech bubbles stand out against a black background. The first says “i love you” while the second replies “blechhckhh.” Elsewhere, on the feedback laced final moments of “Slow Death,” the macabre title is dismissed with a sarcastic “how depressing.”

The bellicose “Reagan Sucks” could be a not-so-distant antecedent of Brakes’ hardcore reduction “Cheney,” while “This Is Art” has more in common with self-referential post-punks like Wire. At a length of 46 seconds, “Go Die” is a template for the bratty branch of hardcore acts that exploded in the SoCal area in the 1990s, all bluster and fire and no breaths taken. “Giving In,” the track that launches the record, is about as rock and roll as things can ever get. Palm-muted, distortion-driven power chords and a vaguely bluesy riff power the song with a high-voltage electrical charge alongside vocals Johnny Rotten would’ve been proud of in his pre-PiL days.

It isn’t likely that I’ll be seeing those Bum Kon shirts the next time my curiosity causes me to poke my head into Trash and Vaudeville, but Drunken Sex Sucks makes it clear that there isn’t any reason why Bum Kon shouldn’t be as revered as their more celebrated contemporaries. At the very least, I hope this earns them a little more respect and recognition, especially from those in the Denver scene they helped build.

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