The Answer To Your Problems?

IN RESPONSE to the charge that his music was “predictable”, Ted Nugent once argued that the word could be applied to all the best things in life, namely eatin’, drinkin’ an’ ruttin’ – not to mention blasting small furry animals to blazes with a shotgun.

Ted might approve of Marky Ramone & the Intruders. The former Brudder’s power-trio (Marky on drums, bassist Johnny Pisano and singer/guitarist Ben Trokan) play the punk parlour game strictly by the numbers, and the numbers in question – 14 songs shoehorned into 29 minutes – are largely interchangeable: hell-for-leather bulletins addressing subjects as evergreen as the lottery (‘Lottery’), life sucking (‘Life Sucks’) and giving the finger (er, ‘Middle Finger’).

This is unpretentious, sweaty, spirited club-punk, somewhere between Green Day and the recently disbanded 3 Colours Red, with the odd dose of, say, Foo Fighters (the suicide storm warning of ‘One Way Ride’) thrown in for good luck. But while numbskullduggery such as ‘Peekhole’, ‘Nobody Likes You’ and ‘Under The Gun’ might go down a treat with those adorable li’l punkers who were born when The Vibrators were still vibrating, in September 1999 these tunes sound not so much out of time as dated. Indeed, the record as a whole is blighted by a serious imagination-deficiency, manifest in a pointless dry-humping of Lennon and McCartney’s ‘Nowhere Man’.

The one glaring exception is the Southside Johnny/E-Street shuffle of ‘Don’t Blame Me’, recorded in mono, produced by Marky himself (Lars Frederiksen hatches the desk on the other tracks), and featuring Joan Jett in a cameo role (“Don’t blame me for the fun that you missed/Don’t blame me ’cos it hurts when you piss!”). But elsewhere, the trio hold true to the principles of 1977, fighting a rearguard action that is not so much punk-heroic as downright Amish in its refusal to acknowledge current climes. This writer would assert that the real spirit of punk was to be found residing not with three-chord tricksters like Slaughter & The Dogs and The Damned, but in the multicultural manoeuvres of the latter-day Clash or the mental experimentalism of PiL.

Glistening production values aside, The Answer To Your Problems? is a record that would’ve sounded run of the mill at any point over the last two decades.