"End of an Era" proves that punk isn't dead, though
a lot of the guys who wear the tee shirts and sing the
songs maybe oughta be.  I'm not going to lie to you
and say that this album changed my life, or tore open
my mind and shoved new ideas into it, or that it made
me walk around feeling like I had a permanent raging
erection the way I felt when I first listened to the
Dead Kennedys or Stiff Little Fingers.  But I will say
it feels like it has that kind of potential.  It feels
like the kind of album that could do exactly that for
somebody who hadn't already had it done for them so
long ago that the feeling was getting crusty and
needed to be re-invigorated every now and then.  And
The Pinkerton Thugs *did* do that for me.  The album
reminded me of what I love about punk.  Any good album
by a band that has more message than marketing schtick
and at least as much balls as it has musicianship can
do that, and this one did.


Based in Boston, The Pinkerton Thugs sing angry songs
about what it's like to spend your whole life being
kicked in the jaw by rich people, by factory
supervisors and by your own friends.  They sing songs
about breaking shit, burning shit and fucking shit up.
Like most bands who have lived the life they sing
about instead of studying it in Anarchy and the Angst
of the Proletarians:  A Comparative Study at college,
The Pinkerton Thugs aren't blaming a nameless faceless
System, they are pointing fingers in very specific
places in many of their songs.  


At the same time, "End of an Era" has intelligent
lyrics which display a knowledge of the history of the
US, the history of anarchism and current affairs.  In
fact lyrically it's the best of all possible worlds -- a
marriage of a knowledge of specific instances of
exploitation and the mechanisms which drive that
exploitation.  In other words, it's full of songs both
about how you get fucked over from day to day *and*
about what the underlying reason for getting fucked
over is.


[On an editorial level, I'm suspicious of much
contemporary anarchist rhetoric, but this album never
comes down to cases, nor should it, so I don't have
anything specific to say about that.  In fact, because
the songs aren't composed in the tired style of WE ARE
ANARCHISTS FEAR US or WE ARE LEFTISTS FEEL OUR SCORN
but instead composed with viciously pointed lyrics and
peppered with allusions, it is more likely to cause
people to actually look up the references and maybe
read Zinn's History of the US and other source
material, and the more people who do *that* the
better.]


I've talked about the lyrics so much because in
political punk that's what matters most to me. 
Musically, the album is about as heavy as you'd expect
from a HC/HC-influenced Boston band.  The vocals are
furious but audible, which seems to be an indication
of how seriously the Pinkerton Thugs take what they're
trying to say.  In political punk albums, to pervert
one of David Byrne's quips, the music is a way to
trick kids into listening to the words, and the album
succeeds at that, too.  The sounds anger up the
nerves, and the words let you know why your nerves are
so easily angered up and what can be done about it.  I
picture the guys from the band as being the sort who
could debate about Keynes in a mosh pit.  (As an
aside, this album has the only musical reference to
Goldman I've seen outside of Phil Ochs.)


"End of an Era" is really a very good album from
start to finish.  As tired as the notion of Cred is,
it's an album that feels drenched with credibility, not
in the "everybody else in the Scene likes it and so
should I" sense, but in the sense that I'm a lot more
likely to listen to songs about economic exploitation
by people who seem to have felt the real pains of
exploitation, and that is how this album feels to me.