Sick Sick Birds
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"Punk Drunk Love"

http://www.citypaper.com/music/review.asp?rid=15422

Punk-Drunk Love

Migrating from the hard-touring Thumbs into the Sick Sick Birds

By Michael Byrne 11/4/2009
"Something about a pint glass breaking always makes your night go better," sings Sick Sick Birds frontman Mike Hall in pop-punk's signature could-yell-if-I-want-to sing-song. That's the introduction to SSB's debut full-length, Heavy Manners (Toxic Pop)--a wicked-fun, eight-song pop-punk romp that nicely straddles the line between basement-show punk spit and bark and grown-up hooks and melodies. Listening, the image that comes up is a sweaty-as-hell Sidebar, or, hell, Memory Lane--everything is jostling and confusing. Maybe it still has that humid cigarette-flavored skeen. Maybe there's a fight. In any case, you just know that at that point someone's riding enough of a buzz to break a glass of something cheap on the floor. You have, quite possibly, seen this scene, almost exactly.

The line above conjures a sense of nostalgia. "Let's have a round for the truest kind of mania," the song continues later, and you know it's talking about the punk club, the show, the frenzy of a crowded room in front of a very loud, snarling band. It feels almost like an homage.

Sick Sick Birds are a relatively new band in Baltimore, starting out in the earlier part of this decade in the wake of the Thumbs--a punk band that included Hall and SSB's guitarist Bobby Borte--which started in 1995 and became local legends before disbanding in 2003. "I'd been in a band pretty much every day of my life for 15 years or so," Hall says, talking about the Thumbs' end. "I think I took it for granted that I had this perfect ready-made channel where I could focus my creative energies. When that was gone, I really felt a little lost.

"I think that the personality of our band was so focused on the idea of being a hard-working touring band," Hall continues. "And, eventually, it just became too hard to keep it up. We were ready to do some other things with our lives, and without the constant touring, the Thumbs just didn't quite make sense."

Which is another way of saying Hall and company have grown up, at least insofar as punk rockers can grow up. And it's really easy for punk bands to fuck up growing up. If you haven't seen the New York Dolls recently, there's still a slight chance you think they're not, like, the saddest live band on the planet. Sick Sick Birds--Borte, Hall, drummer Lee Blades (who replaced Matt Dorsey, boyfriend of City Paper Special Projects Editor Anna Ditkoff, after the recording of Heavy Manners), bassist (and former City Paper contributor) Melissa Jacobsen, and guitarist Eric Jacobsen --rather, have taken their years to heart, ventured into new songwriting ideas, and, vitally, realized that the touring lifestyle isn't a bottomless proposition.

"I think we have been really lucky to find great people to play with who are also at a similar point in their lives," Hall says. "I think we all take the band seriously but, at the same time, we respect the value of each other's time. It also definitely helps to have spouses who understand how important writing and playing music is to us and go out of their way to support our ability to keep doing it.

"Our days of getting in the van for six to eight weeks at a time are certainly over. But I could see us doing a few shorter tours here and there. It would be more of a vacation/tour with all of our spouses, going to places that we would all like to visit."

The band's touring ambitions may be toned down, but the music isn't. The uneasy, blasted edges, though, aren't there so much. SSB songs are cleaner; guitars jangle, a chorus or guitarscape hovers in the background, lyrics are sung rather than scraped out and flung--it's frequently political and pissed pop-punk music that blows kisses to the Clash but just as much to old '70s garage bands. Daresay, Heavy Manners delivers more than a few bona fide earworms.

"I think the presentation has changed, but the songs are actually pretty similar," Hall says. "It's funny, when I wrote for the Thumbs, in my head I was always writing something that sounded kind of like a Cure or Smiths song. You write it on the acoustic and then you get it in the practice room and bang away at it with loud drums and half stacks and vocals to match, and all of a sudden it's a completely different thing. Me and Bobby always thought we were crooning and melodic, and it always came out more pissed-off and aggressive."

That's not the case now. "I think the Sick Sick Birds take more of a song-by-song approach," he says. "Strip a song down to nothing, and then build it back piece by piece by feeding it what it needs to reach its potential. And don't be afraid if each song has a completely different sound. No touring means we have no deadlines on recording. We take our time and get it the way we want it. You put a song out there and it's out there. You can't pull it back."

The Thumbs headed down to what's promised to be a brief reunion at a mammoth pop-punk festival known just as the Fest in Gainesville, Fla. "I think that we decided to do this one because it's an opportunity to hang out with a lot of people and bands that were a huge part of our lives when the Thumbs were touring," Hall says. "I'm pretty sure this is a one-time thing."

Hall, though, is catching an early flight that Sunday morning, so he doesn't miss the chance to take his kids out trick-or-treating. Yes, fatherhood and punk coexist. "Every once in a while I'll overhear one of my kids in the other room singing something like 'Ready, Steady, Go' by Gen X," he says. "And that's a beautiful thing."

- Baltimore City Paper


"Sick Sick Birds 'Heavy Manners'"

http://www.scenepointblank.com/reviews/2781

Sometimes life gets in the way of good music. When the Thumbs disbanded in 2003, Mike Hall and Bobby Borte needed a new outlet. They formed Sick Sick Birds, but families and education have slowed the band's production, leading them to release their first full-length in 2008.

Heavy Manners isn't a far stretch from their previous band, but Sick Sick Birds are their own project and should be judged as such. While the voices and songwriting are familiar, Sick Sick Birds incorporate influences from 70's rock to indie. At their heart, and mostly on their sleeve too, the band fits under the pop-punk umbrella. It's just that bands like this tend to make that umbrella grow. The song structures are more complicated and the guitars have greater variation, but whenever I hear Hall's voice, I'm immediately brought back to those screaming Thumbs days.

It may partly be association from prior works, but something in his voice is perfect for a pop-structured, wounded and angry outlet of a song. While the backing instrumentation accentuates the mounting frustration that Heavy Manners' songs represent, Hall's voice is what carries them. The frustration that he bleeds is done through nuance: Hall isn't screaming himself hoarse - not by a longshot. Rather, his vocals express an aggression that is bubbling beneath the surface. On the record, he never opens up and let's go, but wavers along the threshold and utilizes that tension itself. This would make for an exhausting experience, where it not for the band's exceptional harmonizing, with Melissa Jacobsen's voice offering a smooth and quiet contrast to Hall's lead, with Jacobsen playing something of a Kim Deal role. While the pop-punk structure and tempo is the format, the band's real strength lies with their vocals. The call and response trade-offs between members are well-suited to the members' voices, complementing one another and maintaining an energetic flow.

Side one of the record is generally a more jangly, pop-punk feel with positive tones. On Side two, the influence expands a more on the quirky side, and unifying the record throughout is a classic rock backbone that makes me think of The Used Kids. Heavy Manners may only be eight songs, but it's taken Sick Sick Birds years to put them on wax. Fans should grab this while they can, crossing their fingers that the band will find the time for future releases. - ScenePointBlank


"Sick Sick Birds 'Heavy Manners'"

http://www.razorcake.org/site/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=20767

I wasn’t in the control room when irony came like a rainbow—but was a dark cloud of cynicism—into independent music. But there was a definite shift in the late ‘90s when the torch was passed from Superchunk to The Promise Ring and then somehow ended in the hands of dudes (of both genders) with pants tight enough to curb sperm production (women don’t produce sperm, dude. If you’re going with the whole “both genders” thing, you might want to rethink that one. I’m guessing women in those pants might increase the production of said sperm in straight men.) and the words “indie music” no longer meant “independent” of anything, while the “music” part was debatable at best. (I guess that’s part of the irony. This time was also known as “The Golden Age of the Publicist.” Draw your own conclusions.)

So, if you’re a punk rocker whose knee-jerk response isn’t “Turn that fucker up! Play it faster! More ‘fuck’ in the monitor!” and your scope includes an active liking of Elvis Costello, The Carrie Nations, an appreciation for early Cure and Echo And The Bunnymen, and songs like “Detroit Has a Skyline Too,” without the musty, creaky smell of imperfect nostalgia, I heavily recommend Sick Sick Birds. Early ‘80s indie pop, late ‘90s fireworks, late ‘00s recession-enforced honesty. Blood’s pumping through decades of music effortlessly in each song.

–Todd Taylor (Toxic Pop)
- Razorcake


"Sound Off!: Sick Sick Birds"

http://auralstates.com/2009/11/sound-off-sick-sick-birds.html

You might have noticed that tweens have a bastardized derivation of a once sacred screed from an Exploited album title: “Pop punk’s not dead.”

Few people outside the New Found Glory, All Time Low set find any merit in that statement; what’s moreso, some might argue pop punk was never alive. To those nay-sayers I offer Sick Sick Birds, who prove that you can successfully reconcile maturity, pop, punk, and artistic and musical merit. Tonight, their position opening for Thrushes is really a match made in heaven. SSB distill the essence of mature pop into the bittersweet and pensive melodies that fuel their songs. The heady thrashing of punk is relaxed to a more tension-filled, mid-tempo gait, but the bite is still there. The songs are all anthemic, filled with golden lyrical nuggets and political acumen that inform acerbic commentary moving seamlessly between politics (“We hold these truths. But you hold the reigns”) and life (“A missing information ban. Like only your loneliness can”).

The entirety of the Heavy Manners LP is a treasure, one that gets more rewarding and meaningful with each listen. Opening track “Buildings” is an ode to a reckless and carefree past life, and ignites a vivid wistfulness with its poetic and incisive verses (“Brash plans from late night talkers and beds made from bad ideas”). “Your Machine” coos sweetly, ebullient on the backs of rising horn lines that cut straight to that reflective and nostalgic corner of your brain. ”Hearts & Their Minds” bounces along like the best of the Clash, coming off as an indictment equally on political misdeeds and our complicity in them. ”Power Plant” starts off with a bit of resigned reflection on keeping people under control, before vaulting into a more resilient closing verse that brims with the slightest pangs of hope.

And really, that’s what SSB are all about: working through their complex and intertwined maturation of life, art, and ideology. We emerge with them: older, wiser, and maybe even a bit optimistic.
- Aural States Blog


Discography

Record streaming: http://www.vinylcollective.com/2009/10/14/stream-sick-sick-birds-heavy-manners/ ;
Sick Sick Birds "Heavy Manners" LP, 2009, Toxic Pop Records;
Sick Sick Birds "Chemical Trains" ep 7", 2007 Toxic Pop Records; Sick Sick Birds/Vena Cava split 7", A.D.D. Records 2006.

Photos

Bio

from Baltimore City Paper:
http://www.citypaper.com/music/review.asp?rid=15422

Punk-Drunk Love
Migrating from the hard-touring Thumbs into the Sick Sick Birds

By Michael Byrne | Posted 11/4/2009

"Something about a pint glass breaking always makes your night go better," sings Sick Sick Birds frontman Mike Hall in pop-punk's signature could-yell-if-I-want-to sing-song. That's the introduction to SSB's debut full-length, Heavy Manners (Toxic Pop)--a wicked-fun, eight-song pop-punk romp that nicely straddles the line between basement-show punk spit and bark and grown-up hooks and melodies. Listening, the image that comes up is a sweaty-as-hell Sidebar, or, hell, Memory Lane--everything is jostling and confusing. Maybe it still has that humid cigarette-flavored skeen. Maybe there's a fight. In any case, you just know that at that point someone's riding enough of a buzz to break a glass of something cheap on the floor. You have, quite possibly, seen this scene, almost exactly.

The line above conjures a sense of nostalgia. "Let's have a round for the truest kind of mania," the song continues later, and you know it's talking about the punk club, the show, the frenzy of a crowded room in front of a very loud, snarling band. It feels almost like an homage.

Sick Sick Birds are a relatively new band in Baltimore, starting out in the earlier part of this decade in the wake of the Thumbs--a punk band that included Hall and SSB's guitarist Bobby Borte--which started in 1995 and became local legends before disbanding in 2003. "I'd been in a band pretty much every day of my life for 15 years or so," Hall says, talking about the Thumbs' end. "I think I took it for granted that I had this perfect ready-made channel where I could focus my creative energies. When that was gone, I really felt a little lost.

"I think that the personality of our band was so focused on the idea of being a hard-working touring band," Hall continues. "And, eventually, it just became too hard to keep it up. We were ready to do some other things with our lives, and without the constant touring, the Thumbs just didn't quite make sense."

Which is another way of saying Hall and company have grown up, at least insofar as punk rockers can grow up. And it's really easy for punk bands to fuck up growing up. If you haven't seen the New York Dolls recently, there's still a slight chance you think they're not, like, the saddest live band on the planet. Sick Sick Birds--Borte, Hall, drummer Lee Blades, bassist Melissa Jacobsen, and guitarist Eric Jacobsen --rather, have taken their years to heart, ventured into new songwriting ideas, and, vitally, realized that the touring lifestyle isn't a bottomless proposition.

"I think we have been really lucky to find great people to play with who are also at a similar point in their lives," Hall says. "I think we all take the band seriously but, at the same time, we respect the value of each other's time. It also definitely helps to have spouses who understand how important writing and playing music is to us and go out of their way to support our ability to keep doing it.

"Our days of getting in the van for six to eight weeks at a time are certainly over. But I could see us doing a few shorter tours here and there. It would be more of a vacation/tour with all of our spouses, going to places that we would all like to visit."

The band's touring ambitions may be toned down, but the music isn't. The uneasy, blasted edges, though, aren't there so much. SSB songs are cleaner; guitars jangle, a chorus or guitarscape hovers in the background, lyrics are sung rather than scraped out and flung--it's frequently political and pissed pop-punk music that blows kisses to the Clash but just as much to old '70s garage bands. Daresay, Heavy Manners delivers more than a few bona fide earworms.

"I think the presentation has changed, but the songs are actually pretty similar," Hall says. "It's funny, when I wrote for the Thumbs, in my head I was always writing something that sounded kind of like a Cure or Smiths song. You write it on the acoustic and then you get it in the practice room and bang away at it with loud drums and half stacks and vocals to match, and all of a sudden it's a completely different thing. Me and Bobby always thought we were crooning and melodic, and it always came out more pissed-off and aggressive."

That's not the case now. "I think the Sick Sick Birds take more of a song-by-song approach," he says. "Strip a song down to nothing, and then build it back piece by piece by feeding it what it needs to reach its potential. And don't be afraid if each song has a completely different sound. No touring means we have no deadlines on recording. We take our time and get it the way we want it. You put a song out there and it's out there. You can't pull it back."

The Thumbs headed down to what's promised to be a brief reunion at a mammoth pop-punk festival known just as the Fe