A while back, a fruitful thread on the Pop Punk Message Board entitled "The Great Lost Pop-Punk Band" yielded some fine posts, such as the one on Funbug. Well, lo and lo and behold, Jason Funbug and co. were not only unperturbed by MRML's making of their music freely available but they were positively chuffed. So deeply chuffed, in fact, were they that Jason sent us words of encouragement, the artwork for the first seven inch and some new demos! Hell, yes!
Like some other early-nineties Lookout singles, budgetary limitations here can flatten the entire sound spectrum - especially the drums, obscuring the well-developed song-writing. While they played within the limiting confines of pop-punk (read: loud, fast sing-alongs about girls) Funbug never sounded like a knock-off of anyone. While the band surely learned a few tricks from Screeching Weasel and Green Day, these ears catch more echoes of late eighties pop-punk bands like Mega City Four, Leatherface, Big Drill Car, The Doughboys and (I swear this is a very good thing) Twin/Tone era Soul Asylum.
Funbug - Everything
If you think the artwork for this release is ugly, I'm told you're supposed to blame Lookout honcho Lawrence Livermore who tossed out the band's original artwork and replaced it with that picture of his sister and her baby.
Here's some demos for the forthcoming Funbug work, which is promising some great songs with the hooks pushed to the fore, like "Frankenstein Drives to Leamington".
Links for the Tezbinetop e.p and the demos can be found in the comments:
Speaking of comments: give us you review of Funbug new and old!
A big thanks to Jason Funbug for all the material for this post!
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Tezbinitop e.p.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.mediafire.com/download.php?rczmgntzj2m
Demos
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?dmoamxd5n2k
Now that was some fun...bug!
ReplyDelete(silence followed by a cough)
Anyway, to these ears Funbug sound like they reside somewhere between MC4 and Low Brow - a nice place to visit if you ask me.
Yup it's a part of a small, under appreciated sub-set of pop-punk.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure if we encountered a used copy of their full length CD in a store on one of our many rock walks, you would have told me it was "very Tyler", and you'd have been correct. I am seriously enjoying this stuff enough to want to buy that discography CD. However, I feel like Funbug suffers a bit from Schleprock syndrome. They are a tremendously good band who suffered from a not-so-catchy name and marginal cover art.
ReplyDelete(And speaking of which, I have spoken to at least two people who said they refused to give Schleprock's album a listen because that cover art is so terrible!)
Tyler
ReplyDeleteMoi, force an album on toi? Never. (Though you were to blame for two of the album on best-of-09 list, so maybe turnabout's fair play.)
Yeah the cover art is awful. I can see why the guys in the band were so angry when they opened the box - I think it's similar to the experience that the boys in Propgandhi had when they finally saw the cover of their first album.
prob the best time of my life top guys top pop punk funbug have made so many people happy and wish the three or four or five would just play live again top guys marky mark
ReplyDeleteMight happen, marky, might happen...
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