The Murderburgers – How To Ruin Your Life

It’s a fact of life. As you grow older, your musical preferences tend to change, most often becoming somewhat milder. Don’t get me wrong, I still love a good mosh breakdown as much as the next Neanderthal, but now that I’m pushing 35, for some reason I don’t feel the urge anymore to constantly have some buffoon screaming obscenities and death threats in my face while commuting to work or working at my computer. So a while back, I started to get more and more into punkrock. Since I wasn’t already wearing a Ramones onesy in my toddler days and so far have not felt the urge to backtrack my way through 35 years of punkrock history, reviewing records in this genre for me is somewhat hard. I could not name a Screeching Weasel, Leatherface or Dillenger Four song or album if my life depended on it, so i do not have a whole lot of references to throw around. I therefore have to keep thing simple: here are The Murderburgers. They sound like the perfect mix of two bands I like: Dear Landlord and Teenage Bottlerocket.

Throughout this full length album, apparently their fourth since starting out in 2007, these three lads from Glasgow, Scotland offer a fine cocktail of Dear Landlord’s rowdy lifeisfuckingstupid-melancholy and Bottlerocket’s distinct lead melodies and sense of fun. Up-beat, cheerful, melodic but slightly raw poppunk with lyrics about losing your job, losing your girl and losing your mind (while constantly remaining somewhat tongue-in-cheek, so never reaching Off With Their Head-levels of clinical depression), sung in a voice that punkrock purists probably will call ‘snotty’ (nowhere near Kevin Aper snotty, but snotty none the less).

This is probably not an album that will change punkrock history, but I sure enjoy the hell out of anthems like ‘Unemployment, Here I Come’ , ‘Broken Brain’ and my personal new themesong ‘Gimme Gimme Negativity’. “Please, stop fucking smiling! The future’s not great for you, it’s not great for me, gimme gimme negativity!” I say cheers to that.

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