Direct Hit! – Brainless God

The thorough editing process under which insanely catchy pop punk outfit Direct Hit!’s full length Domesplitter came to be marked one of the strongest debuts in recent memory.  But as Domesplitter was a culmination of tweaked fan favourites spanning their initial collection of EPs, it was hard to imagine the trio emulating their success under new conditions.  In fact, Brainless God marks the band’s first attempt at generating a full-length album without thoroughly running each song through the fan-tested ringer.  Combine that with the Milwaukee troupe’s aspirations of generating a “full blown concept album about the end of the world,” and you’d think Direct Hit! would be in well over their heads.

You’d be wrong.

In fact, Brainless God might be one of the only ways a themed feature length punk album can truly work.  Opting to gradually ease into the apocalyptic material through a thematic approach, the band avoids the pretentious pitfalls of a full-blown narrative.  Consequently, Direct Hit! never sacrifices their machine gun momentum, strapping fans into the passenger’s seat of an over the top car chase.  And while the first half of opener “On & On” serves as something of an artsy prelude (it’s actually played to the mellow tune of “auld lang syne”), its sudden transformation emulates the sense of accelerating from zero to sixty in mere seconds; going out with the old and in with the new, echoing the sense of being jolted from your everyday life and thrust into a chaotic, apocalyptic clamor.

Brainless God can be summed up quickly with in the track title “The World Is Ending (No One cares).” Negligence is the name of the game here as Nick Woods sings the anthem of so many self-absorbed urbanites going to hell in a hand basket; “take a ride on the ‘H’ train to your destiny, take a ride in the express lane to your doom.”  The image of “St. Peter laughing in heaven” at millions unable to answer the question “have you been saved, can you tell me his name?” crosses a few boundaries in what is typically a secular punk movement, and couldn’t work better under any other tongue-in-cheek context. 

The overriding sense of humour has that unmistakable Direct Hit! stamp.  The dark opening line of “Buried Alive” is sure to raise a morbid chuckle with lines like,  “He’s got a carcass in the basement, and it’s high time he found a replacement, it’ll be just like a first date, but better.”  Perhaps most surprisingly though is how much societal truth pokes through all of the madness.   At about the half waypoint “Heaven Is A Black Hole” and its neighbor marks the realization that both people and an forgiving God are so set in their ways with their blinders on that they wouldn’t change during their final breath even if an impending doom were spelled out for them.  In many respects the album is about uncertainty, which comes reflected in how many times they change their tune in songs like “I Told You A Lie,” which seesaws between poppy choruses and a panicked, thrashy finale.  It’s only after the bomb drops, in “A Message To the Angels (Brainless God),” and the gates of heaven remain locked to an angry mob does the band spell out the eternal consequences of unjust judgments from above.

In the end though, everything boils down to the overriding fun packed into Brainless God.  The catchy musical core remains informed by the likes of Off With Your Heads, Dillinger Four, and Banner Pilot, but benefits from a shiny new finish thanks to All-American Rejects guitarist Mike Kennerty’s role in the producer’s booth which might add Teenage Bottlerocket to that list.  And like all good concept albums, nothing is spelled out in black and white.  Fans that come for the catchy tunes will slowly decode new insights with each listen.  It’s rare that a thinking man’s album can be so much fun, but that’s whereDirect Hit! excels, and ultimately what makes Brainless God such a significant achievement.