metal | Damon Norko

I hear that Macklemore has a new protest song called “F–D Up”, and it’s doing pretty good – more power to the man. But we’ve had a couple of protest songs kicking around for some time. Song #9 in our set list is “Consumer Report” – a song that does call up Ralph Nader’s old magazine and proposes a few more products that should be recalled. Some of them aren’t products, but whatever. This song has been revised and expanded since its 1986 origins and now features fabulous vocal orchestration and a fun new chorus that propels this song through four verses of escalating customer complaints. Featuring a really jangling hook of a guitar solo that Jim opens the song with and reprises throughout the song. “Consumer Report” is the next song scheduled for the studio… can’t wait. Here’s the final, all-new verse:

Recall the web with you inside

Recall the good people on both sides

Recall the plastic from out your brain

Recall the debts that don’t get paid –

‘Cause the brakes don’t hold, the brakes don’t hold

And the pistons keep running on…”

> Don’t miss the fun this Saturday night!

Song #8 in The Submensas’s set is “Strange Graves” – a true ‘long-lost’ song. A classic punk song in the vein of The Clash, it was a fourth song recorded for our 1986 EP, “Twilight in Beltland,” but was left off the vinyl because I wasn’t satisfied with the vocals. I intended to re-record the song but that never happened, and the master tape of these sessions has been long lost. But now this two-minute song has had a renaissance, and is back as a boppy little number with jangly vocals and an upbeat guitar riff. We put “Strange Graves” on our 2012 compilation, “Trading Cards of Glory”, but it’s a little grainy because the recording was from a CASSETTE. So we now have a great new version. Here’s how the song starts…

How many times will the world rock and roll,

Before it finally breaks asunder?

And how many mixed-up little piles of debris

Will you and I be buried under?

A strange grave here/ A strange grave there/

all graves/ are strange

… and then I list a bunch of ways to die. The meaning of the song is a little interpretive, but I would say it has to do with choices and how we’ll end up in the places that we’ll end up in… It’s like a mini-version of Jim Carroll’s “People Who Died”. (It’s two mins, whereas Jim Carroll’s song lasts five and a half.)