VAN JOHNSON – ladies and gentlemen …

(7”, Fire Walk With Me / Exotic Fever)

The full title of this little slab of energy is “ladies and gentlemen … from Ottawa, Canada Van Johnsons”. Or maybe it is just the label being polite and introducing this band, who knows? This kind of patriotism has once been a matter of dispute between me and one of my best friends and coincidentally it also involved Canada. We were discussing in how far it is okay for a band within the hardcore or punkrock circle to point out their geographic point of origin or even to be proud of it. A lot of us go with the “patriots are idiots”-slogan quite easily and there is something behind it. “I am proud of being an Austrian” is a damn stupid sentence, because you can only be proud of something you ever did. That aside, there is another, more likeable way of handling your geographic roots, because after all, these places were we come from do make up an important part of our personality. This is not the dumb “I am representing my hood”-stance of some current hip hop, but rather the public announcement of one’s own sense of place and location. Like Valina, when they go onstage and anounce: we are Valina from Linz. That’s okay, I think. There is no hidden pride inside there.

This said, I’ll have to admit that I have somehow lost touch with the hardcore scene in the last years. Every now and then I buy a couple of records that stand out from the crowd somehow for being more wild or more experimental than the rest. Last year, during one big spring clean out I have packed a box with seven inches that looked the same mostly and that I haven’t listened to in years. Some of them I even didn’t knew I owned anymore. What’s this got to do with this seven inch by Van Johnson? Well, it makes me regret that. It makes me feel the energy and power, the love and work that still goes into the hardcore scene (though I’ll hold my theory up, that a lot of what makes the hardcore scene go on and on is the money given to kids by their parents) and hopefully always will. In the hope that someone who has visited underground DIY punkrock shows or contributed to the scene himself will never turn out a rightwing sociopath with a family he hates and constantly voting for the wrong party.

Van Johnson are quite damn noisy, hiding beneath a wall of distorted guitars and screaming, when inside there hides a sense for harmony that you can find if you look hard enough. They pound through the two songs on this record with fervor and youthful energy, the guitars bursting through eardrums and the vocals screeching and wailing their way through the lyrics. But they are also never losing sight of structure and rhythm, which is important for the punch. And the punch is almost all that’s important in this kind of music. That doesn’t means style, by the way. Style is a restriction and I don’t think Van Johnson give a lot of thought towards restrictions anyway. They ain’t even afraid of using handclaps or making the guitar do tick tack sounds like an old alarm clock.