With “Fury Road,” the fourth Mad Max movie, on indefinite hiatus, not even professional gossips can be bothered to speculate about whether Tina Turner will reprise her Aunty Entity role from Beyond Thunderdome. (“We Don’t Need Another Hero,” remember?) Personally, I’m still pissed that the screenwriters killed off Lord Humungus–“the Ayatollah of Rock ‘n’ Rollah!”–in The Road Warrior, but I’m prepared to let bygones be bygones and offer the producers some free advice. If you want a real live band in your movie–not just on the sound track but actually on-screen, toiling in a shower of broken bottle glass like the Blues Brothers or the Mono Men–talk to the A Frames. They’re from Seattle, and on March 22 they put out their third album, Black Forest, on Sub Pop.
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I’m not completely convinced that industrial music will die when industrial civilization does. But old-school punk rock–a genre fueled by disgust, nihilism, and outrage–will almost certainly undergo a radical change in form if the culture that provoked its contempt in the first place actually goes tits up. That’s why the A Frames are the perfect Mad Max band. Instead of rooting for the apocalypse without wondering what’ll happen after the smoke clears, they imagine that the final calamity has already befallen us: “No churches no garbage cans / No punk no garage bands / No organism left to grow / Black forest and fallout snow.” How will the survivors carry on? Not by ranting and raving and bashing out power chords–raging against the machine is finally genuinely pointless, because the machine has broken down. To function at all, anybody still walking and talking will have to keep his terror and grief ruthlessly under control, buried deeper than a NORAD bunker.
On the LP version of the band’s previous album, A Frames 2, released in 2003 by Sacramento punk guru Scott Soriano on S-S Records, the three members aren’t credited at all. But on Black Forest they use the pseudonyms they’ve played under at least since their 2000 Dragnet seven-inch, “Neutron Bomb.” Guitarist and front man Erin Sullivan is identified as “Emphysema,” bassist Min Yee as “Cholera,” and drummer Lars Finberg as “Ricketts.” The CD’s nearly featureless slipcover is printed to look like it’s made of torn black gaffer’s tape, with the group’s name punched through it to show the black background behind.
Of course, it’s risky to assume a band intends to be funny when its music seems so serious–get it wrong and it’s like congratulating a woman on her pregnancy when all she’s done is put on 15 pounds over Christmas. But I’m happy to leave the question open until the A Frames turn up in “Fury Road”–at which point I’ll consider myself in on the joke.
