“It’s ingrained in us, so I might as well do it on something that I get moderately positive feedback about. “Coming from my white dude perspective, you just need to share your opinion,” he says. Since early 2009, between his day job, recording with Pissed Jeans, and touring infrequently, he runs Yellow Green Red, a punk blog that serves as an epicenter for well-considered reviews of music typically ignored by major media outlets. The discovery of acts that exist beyond what’s buzzy in a given moment is a pursuit Korvette has always identified with.
I want to have my woke-ness and eat it too. “Here’s the thing: he missed out on us signing to Sub Pop and now we’re totally rich,” Huth adds. “The original drummer of Pissed Jeans moved back like a year later and was like, ‘Oh, you guys are on Sub Pop now?’” Korvette jokes. Also, actually, Pissed Jeans needs a drummer.’ The way I remember it, the first time I played with these guys in Allentown, PA, I remember instantly feeling like, ‘This is totally going to work. Matt was like, ‘Yeah, here’s their email.
“Someone said something about Pissed Jeans: ‘Oh, they need a new drummer!’ I was like, ‘That should be me!’ I emailed Matt saying, ‘Hey, just looking to get in touch with Air Conditioning to see if they need a drummer,’ thinking maybe he’ll put it together. “I was in a record store on South Street called Space Boy.” McGuinness recalls. The trio met drummer Sean McGuinness a year after their original percussionist moved to North Carolina, right after the band recorded their debut LP Shallow. Korvette says simply, “I want to have my woke-ness and eat it too.” On Honeys, in “Male Gaze,” Korvette considered himself to be one of the men he’s criticizing: “ It's just the male gaze, it's in me, I know it / I feel it all around me, I wish I could destroy it / Yeah it's the male gaze, I've had it forever / And I know I'm no angel, but I'm trying to kill it.” On Why Love Now, he’s not immune the socio-behavioral expectations of maleness, but he-and his band-are trying to be better. Pissed Jeans’ want for male enlightenment-a certain sensitivity to victims of shitty dude behavior along with the acknowledgment of their own faults within it-is not new. “That’s from finding out every other week, some celebrity or local scene guy: ‘Oh yeah, he drugged a few girls’ or ‘He dropped date rape drugs in people’s drinks’ or ‘He’s been harassing his girlfriend for three years,’” Korvette says.
It’s not so much that they fail, but that their system was flawed in the first place. They’re wholly unsuccessful and wind up mocking the situation along the way. That feeling resonates most on the record’s first single, “The Bar Is Low.” In the video, Pissed Jeans work out in a gym, quite literally aspiring to some sort of bar, a male ideal of fitness. On their latest album, their fifth full-length, Why Love Now, it’s more of an outward observation that settles on a critique of manhood, of understanding certain privileges that have made even the most soul-sucking situations for them, a band of white cis straight men, less soul-sucky. In the past, Pissed Jeans have treated that invisibility with an introspective tone. He now works from home, though office environments have always been a place for Korvette to unpack humdrum truths in partial anonymity. You died.” It’s emblematic of the dystopic punk that has made Pissed Jeans successful: bleak as hell, and funny.įor a while, Korvette kept his musical aspirations hidden from his colleagues-no one wants to be the guy at work who brags about his band, or the guy whose successful band’s repertoire consists of songs about finding joy in his coworkers’ demise. On their last album, 2013’s Honeys, Korvette sang about the death of an imaginary coworker in “Cafeteria Food”: “People walking around looking sorry. Pissed Jeans’ primary shtick has been to scream about mundanity, creating drama out of the ordinary for the sake of not dying from boredom.