Defiance, Ohio

I saw these guys at Howl last year. The band "Defiance, Ohio" I mean. The crowd loved them, and so did I. As I walked into Tompkins Square Park, I honestly thought, "Oh wow, the Dropkick Murphys are playing but they've gotten contemplative and added a strings section." "And they've tightened their shit up," I added. But I was wrong! It was Defiance, Ohio, the best punk/folk/vocal-harmony/has-an-impressive-strings-section band I've seen in a long time. You may not think that immediately guessing a band was some new evolution of the Dropkick Murphys is a good endorsement, true, but then you may also be a massive pussy (pardon the language, you mincing little pussy).

Defiance, Ohio is outstanding. I immediately regretted that I left before their set was over, departing with nothing but their CD LP The Great Depression. As I listened to it, not once but several times, I realized that here is a great band. But what is mysterious to me is that Defiance, Ohio appears to still function in the world of self-produced under-circulated CD's and house shows. Which makes a certain kind of sense, because their music sounds like the best band you ever heard at a house show in your most perfect dreams of parties, youth, enthusiasm for life's bounties, and the best side of human nature.

Defiance, Ohio produces music with a simple rubric - make the good kind of punk, with solid quality country and rock sensibilities, a sturdy string quartet backing it, vocal combos of good lead male and female vocals backed with either classic pop harmonies or punk shouting as needed by the song at any particular moment, smart arrangements, and the high, engaged energy of young people singing for their best friends. Honestly, any band could do well with the formula.

I mention them simply because they are terrific, and mysteriously, not yet popular. I do not mean to establish ground being broken - I set so many trends that no reasonable documentarian could keep up with me - I just want to make sure people are hearing this stuff.

You may well seek out The Great Depression or any of Defiance, Ohio's sadly paltry YouTube offerings (frequently in basements &c) and decide that you do not in fact like them. Quite reasonable, and please cf my earlier remarks about you, and the state of being a massive pussy. Also, please consider that perhaps you are a moron (in the classical sense, the really nasty and not quite PC sense) and that you have no balls, or if you are a woman, that your oves are broken and possibly point the wrong way, that you may indeed have oves facing out and tubes starving to death twisting up inside you because your ovaries are all backwards and you consequently cannot recognize when hyper-political garage bands from Ohio are awesome.

In conclusion, I like Defiance, Ohio, and believe that other people interested in punk, folk, anti-folk, or various other meaningless generic sub-divisions of music that obstruct one simply saying "high energy" or "good" music might also enjoy them.