The Cutbacks

The Cutbacks met as a result of the collective repulsion at all of the meaningless, overnight trends that consume the minds of most teenagers. If it wasn’t for that they may never have even made eye contact with each other in the corridors of their high school. One of them was captain of the wrestling team. One of them was in the advanced math classes. One of them was in the musicals. One of them was a poet. But when they came together in that filthy basement for the first time, what they realized was that the wrestler could make a drum set crumble with every beat. The math whiz could write songs in modes that the rest of them had never heard of. The musical theater kid could make himself bleed with furious rages on stage, and the poet could make a guitar sing through a tiny, beat-up amp. The resulting music is an example of what happens when four dirty kids with no money try to write feel good pop songs in the shadow of the steel and concrete of a post-industrial city; the sounds are skewed. Sunshine through a gray haze. Love through a window of adolescent perversion. Truth in hopelessness. After one of their live concerts, you might feel beaten or bruised. You might feel sick. But they mean well, they really do.