In case you hadn’t noticed, I have a particularly strange relationship with punk rock. On the one hand, I absolutely love it: I love its sound, its ideas, its possibility, and I love what it can allow music to become. However, in a lot of the reviews that I write (and in a lot of my thoughts about music in general) I feel like punk has often been undersold, that rather than living up to its full potential as an art form and a musical idea, over time punk has lost much of its dynamism and become static and unchanging. Time and time again I’ve found myself lamenting the fact that kids today have forgotten that punk used to be term without a clear definition or sound, that at its inception in the early 70s, one didn’t even necessarily need guitars to have a punk band (why just look at Suicide: one vocalist + one electronic nerd = proto-punk gold). Rather than being a living, breathing, evolving thing with any number of possible sounds and attitudes, punk has been reduced to some caricature of young men playing sloppy music with fuck you lyrics, repeating musical ideas that haven’t really broken much new ground since the mid-1980s. Thinking about all the rising bands that are regularly excluded from the canon of punk because their sound is too new, experimental, or simply too unlike what punk is “supposed” to sound like, I sometimes wonder how this genre has survived at all. I mean, what kind of complete idiot could listen to the same fucking songs over and over again and still come away even remotely excited?

This idiot… apparently.

Yes, I must admit, for all my high-minded bluster about the unexplored frontiers of punk in my heart I’m still just a simple rocker kid and the distorted sounds of a handful of poorly recorded guitar chords will always warm the cockles of my punk rock soul. Not only do I enjoy the occasional cookie-cutter punk band, from time to time I absolutely adore them.

Take South Jersey’s Farcial Hoodwink for example: with their early Descendents-tinged pop punk sound, rough four-track production, and their lyrical fixation on Nazis, High School, and girls, FH are pretty much the living embodiment of a punk rock cliché. Throughout their entire self-released, self-titled LP, the only real discernable spark of true originality is on their track “I Hate The UN,” a track which is to my knowledge constitutes the first ever lampooning of the United Nations by a DIY punk act. And yet, listening to this record, the fact that Farcial Hoodwink’s musical fare is almost entirely couched within the well-worn statutes of punk rock orthodoxy really doesn’t matter all that much.

It’s hard to say what exactly it is about this record that won me over… Maybe it’s Farcial Hoodwink’s ability to dish out consistently catchy refrains and high-energy guitar playing, maybe it’s because their fuzzy four-track production makes them a bit like Eric’s Trip, or maybe it’s because it’s just so clear that these kids are simply rocking along for the fun of it. Whatever the cause, this record has been dominating my stereo for the past month or so, rotting my brain with addictive choruses such as “Sheeee wears a swastikaaa – but I like her a lotstika!” on the indomitably poppy “Nazi Girlfriend.” Among this album’s many highlights include the cute-as-heck basement punk anthem “Good Things Happen,” the track “You’ve Got Enough” which wins the prize for the best breakdowns on the whole record (and one of the few tracks on the album that comes close to hardcore… in the 1979 sense of the word, that is), and of course the band’s opus “I Hope You Die, Hitler,” a straightforward punk song whose chorus will immediately lodge itself in your skull whether you like it or not.

I guess the moral of all this is that while the punk world is still in desperate need of new ideas to stay fresh and true to its original mission, there’s still quite a bit to be said for an enthusiastic rehashing of the status quo. Thanks for keeping the faith, Farcial Hoodwink. You did good.