The Ergs - Upstairs/Downstairs LP/CD

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THE ERGS! - Upstairs/Downstairs (Dirtnap Records) I was going to do a song by song analysis of this album, but then I remembered that The Ergs! are the best band in punk rock right now. There is no one better. Period. If you don't believe me, pick up this album and everything else they've ever put out, you'll see. Don't blame me if you don't get it. Blame the system because someone along the way let you down! - Chris Crusher, Jersey Beat Zine

The Ergs! - Upstairs/Downstairs - Dirtnap
Hailing from New Jersey, the Ergs! are putting a new spin on the classic North American pop punk sound. The lazy man's review would say something about Screeching Weasel and the Ramones, but people who know better would pick up the heavy Replacements and Husker Du influence, as well as Dinosaur Jr and Sebadoh. This is a band made up of music nerds writting catchy pop songs, dealing with things other record nerds can relate to and for that I, being a record nerd am grateful. On this album, they turn down the "class of '95" style punk and focus more on song writting and smarter hooks, without sacrificing the youthful awesomeness and playful energy that we all have come to love. The most noticable aspect of this record is the lengthy final track, which ends with an extended jam filled with soaring guitar solos and feedback and flanger filled noise. This track is great for hanging out at home and reading, but not so much for long drives from Chicago to Minneapolis to see Naked Raygun and the Dillinger Four. This record is well worth owning as it's equally fun and engaging.- Punks Not Profits

The Ergs!Upstairs/Downstairs (Dirtnap Records)

If The Ergs! ever break up, I will be officially depressed. For at least one hour, I will be incapable of chewing food. I will play all of the band's old records for my shrink (who will claim not to "get" it, leading me to scream, "If only you'd seen them live, you'd fucking understand!"). I will take a long hiatus from Now Wave, filling the void in my soul with the dangers of deep sea fishing. I will invite a Jehovah's Witness into my home. The breakup of no other current band could precipitate such an upheaval in this writer's life. That's why The Ergs! are the best band out there. And the best band out there has just put out its best album to date. You should buy it.

The Ergs!, incredibly, have managed to change AND stay the same simultaneously. Upstairs/Downstairs is mostly filled with songs in the classic Ergs! style: fast melodic punk teetering somewhere between old SST hardcore and the catchiest pop you've ever heard. The Ergs! are the kings of this type of music. Nobody does it better, and they're so unbelievably good at it that it never grows tiresome or feels redundant. They are the Bill Hicks to Descendents/All's Lenny Bruce - not the originators, but in many ways the perfecters. "Boston, Mass", "Fluorescent Stars", "It'll Be OK", and "Trouble In River City" mine gold from the old formula, all of them reprising the signature Ergs! sound but none of them feeling like pointless rehash.

But while The Ergs! are practically godheads of an entire sub-genre, they are hardly limited to that arena. "Books About Miles Davis" (reviewed here yesterday) breaks new Ergian ground, while "Stinking Of Whiskey Blues" is an absolutely GREAT country tune out of the old "drinking-and-heartbreak" school. "See Him Again" is hopped-up British Invasion pop in the mold of the last album's wonderful "Rod Argent". But the magnum opus here is the title track, an 18-minute amalgamation of pop-punk, free jazz, psychedelic noise, and experimental rock. Dedicated to Can's Malcolm Mooney and more than a little reminiscent of the infamous Zen Arcade closer "Reoccurring Dreams", "Upstairs/Downstairs" might try your patience or send you running for the stop button. But I highly recommend sitting through the whole track at least once. In structure and scope, it's practically symphonic - a typically Ergish pop song giving way to a mind-bending drone giving way to an avant garde guitar hailstorm. I myself have sat there thinking, "Christ! How long is this one going to go on?!", yet when it's all over I kinda just go, "Wow." Definitely an impressive achievement, and quite the showcase for Jeff Schroeck's stunning guitar playing.

Produced by Conrad Uno at Egg Studios in Seattle, Upstairs/Downstairs merely reaffirms what's been evident for years: The Ergs! are one of the most musically gifted groups the punk world has ever known. Schroeck is absolutely out of this world on guitar. He has the chops and creativity of a virtuoso but grounds it all in the satisfying simplicity of a conventional pop-punk style. And that rhythm section! If you ask me, it's the best in all of punk. The well-guarded secret over who really played bass on Can't Stand The Rezillos can now be told: it was Joe Keller. How did he manage such a feat several years before he was even born? Easy: time travel! Such things are entirely possible in the world of The Ergs!

Vocals and lyrics, always a centerpiece of The Ergs! experience, really shine on this album. Mike Yannich is perhaps my favorite vocalist working today - he was born to sing these songs about heartache and longing. Snot-nosed but not generically snotty & lovelorn but not annoyingly wussy, Yannich is the pop-punk singer you'd most like to have a beer with. As always, he's at his best when he's pining for girls he once loved (or girls he wished he could have loved!). And having reached the ripe old age of 26, he seems to have plunged even greater depths of the universal boy/girl dynamic. Who among us cannot relate to the anguish of watching the one we adore spurn us for the wrong person ("Your Cheated Heart", "See Him Again")? Who among us hasn't foolishly fallen for the wrong person ("Stinking of Whiskey Blues")? And like any incurable rock geek, Yannich finds memories of old loves in the notes of old songs:

Heard a song from the album "Boston, Mass"/
by the Del Fuegos the other day/
It sounded good, I remembered how you used to like them/
So I wrote this letter, but I didn't send it out/
'Did you ever get married?'/
I don't think I wanna know/
'Cause this torch that I carry/
Is burning up my soul

The other two Ergs! continue to blow me away with their songwriting. Schroeck, whose vocal style used to remind me of a professional wrestler trash-talking an opponent, now sounds like he could be Bob Mould's little brother. His contributions to this album are two of his finest songs yet. And his poetry absolutely knocks me out. If he ever writes a book, I'm buying mass quantities. "Bike Shoppe" brings a tear to my eye, while "Girls of the Market Square" renders a vivid, indelible portrait:

She's always changing her mind/
She's always giving advice or giving out signs/
The cigarette smoke is rising and/
The coffee rolls across her lips

Keller turns out some extraordinary writing as well. "The Second Foundation" combines the lyrical density of early Springsteen with the techno-social concerns of Issac Asimov. "It'll Be OK" illuminates a doomed, dysfunctional romance with surprising tenderness. Already one of my all-time favorite Ergs! songs, "Hysterical Fiction" pursues pharmaceutical advancements as a means of curing co-dependent relationships:

Guess I should change the sheets/
Now that the word is that you're never coming back/
I've heard there's a chemical in the skin/
That keeps one attached/
Howling wolves turn into losers/
Battered wives return to abusers/
Lying in the corner broken intravenous abusers/
I'm gonna take your pillowcase down to the lab/
I'm gonna precipitate what's left of what we had/
And you can smoke it

The magic of The Ergs! is that all three members are vital cogs in the machine. Subtract one person from the equation, and you're left with something far less than The Ergs! And while I'd welcome the appearance of three simultaneously-released solo Erg albums a la KISS, I'm more excited about the idea that this group has been together seven years and still has barely scratched the surface of its potential. This trio continues to surprise us, yet retains all the essential qualities we've loved since the very first demos. With several more releases on the way this year alone, it seems we have an awful lot to look forward to!

Lord Rutledge
April 21, 2007

The Ergs – Upstairs/Downstairs (Dirtnap)
In a recent Dirtnap order, they mistakenly sent me this Lp instead of what I had ordered. They were nice enough to send me a copy of what I ordered and let me keep this Lp (on limited-edition brown vinyl, too) for no extra charge (so buy directly from them). Anyway I’d been meaning to check out this New Jersey-based band for some time anyway as I’d heard they were a DESCENDENTS-style pop-punk band and thought that it was about time that the once terrific (until BLINK-182 and their ilk ruined it) genre got a jumpstart. Anyway I like this record, but it reminds me less of The Descendents than it does of early ‘90s, East Coast pop-punk stalwarts like WESTON, PLOW UNITED and especially THE BOUNCING SOULS. It’s not a coincidence that all of these aforementioned bands also either came from New Jersey (in the case of The Bouncing Souls) or in the case of the other two, played many shows there despite coming from the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania, thus having a considerable fanbase there that probably included these guys.

While most of this record is straightforward pop-punk, albeit played at an almost thrash-like pace, there’s a funny attempt at a country-tinged song called “Stinking of Whiskey Blues” and a long, unnecessary jam at the end of the title track (which is also the album’s last track). Nevertheless, this is an enjoyable record that will no doubt get better over time as I feel that The Ergs are throwing so much at the listener that it will take multiple listens to fully comprehend all of what’s going on. - Matthew Berylant, Big Takeover Zine

The joke hasn't yet worn thin for the Ergs, but the seams might be starting to show a bit. The Jersey pop-punk trio's second full-length album isn't exactly a bid for mature artistic credibility, but it's notably less willfully silly than what has come before, and frankly, some of the jokier topics feel a little stale. Songs about Isaac Asimov fanboyism ("2nd Foundation") and recycling clichés derived from The Music Man ("Trouble In River City") aren't exactly the height of cleverness. On the plus side, however, the Ergs' knack for ultra-speedy, ultra-catchy pop-punk tunes in the best tradition of the Ramones, Undertones and Queers continues unabated: these 15 tracks get knocked out in a breathless half-hour of breakneck tempos and ramalama melodies topped with the group's trademark silly/smart lyrics. Picking individual highlights of an album designed to rush past in a breathless, geeky blur is a fool's errand, but the gloriously bratty "Books About Miles Davis" is a particular gem. ~ Stewart Mason, All Music Guide

What keeps NJ's Ergs! just ahead of every other pop-punk band these days is their constantly evolving sound. With last year's "Jersey's Best Prancers" EP, they took their upbeat, pop-based sound and made it a little rougher and dirtier around the edges. They've gone even further in that direction on this, at times recalling bands like Hüsker Dü and the Descendents, and the result is their riskiest and best release to date.

The songwriting is lean, without any fat to be found. Only a handful of tracks break the 2-minute mark, but none ever feel like they fall short or don't reach their potential. As always with The Ergs!, the musicianship is excellent and very tight without ever stepping on the melodies that are the heart of the songs. There are even a couple musical diversions, most notably the title track and the full-on country rock of "Stinking of Whiskey Blues." Sequenced in between the (relatively) harder "Girls of the Market Square" and the hook-filled (and Music Man/Harvey Danger referencing) "Trouble in River City", "Whiskey" could possibly wreck the flow and feel of the record, but rather just adds to it. It sounds like an extension of what they were exploring on their "Cotton Pickin' Minute" EP, and it shows Mikey Ergs's true versatility as a songwriter.

One aspect of the band's writing that's grown immeasurably is their attention to arrangement and dynamics. One perfect example is in "See Him Again," which seems at the start to be a fairly basic pop tune. By the end, however, they've built the tension subtly and kick the intensity up at just the right moment before the finish to bring the song to a whole other level. "Books About Miles Davis" could've remained a standard guitar/vocals-only song that doesn't go much of anywhere in the hands of a lesser band. Rather than settle for that, The Ergs! know just how to place a couple short measures of the full band stepping in, giving the song exactly what it needs to be great.

Lyrically, the record deals mostly with relationships failing and the inevitability of growing up. The relationship songs seem to be coming from a different, more bitter place than on the last LP. "Your Cheated Heart" chides someone who claims to be too hurt to keep trusting, "Trouble in River City" wishes the girl would just get the hell away for once, and "See Him Again" is a perfect picture of a guy who's not getting much out of a doomed relationship. All of this adds to an underlying tension throughout the record, which explodes in the 18-minute title track at the end.

"Upstairs/Downstairs" starts out reminiscent of the Pixies, with the bass and drums keeping a mid-tempo rhythm for the guitar riff to come in over. After a short batch of lyrics, around the 2-minute mark, the band starts to build up a noise jam over the constantly repeated words of the title. They slowly take apart the melody of the song, releasing all the tension and frustration that had been accumulating throughout the LP. By the last few minutes, only 2 guitars remain, one barely holding on to the song's melody while the other flails and feeds back. It's a noise catharsis that brings to mind "Reoccuring Dream" from Hüsker Dü's masterpiece "Zen Arcade." It's a risky move for a band like theirs, but they pull it off extremely well. There's no other way I can imagine this record ending. Not every song on the album is the best thing they've written, but the great ones are, without a doubt, their absolute best work yet. Most importantly, they all flow together to be greater than the sum of their parts. I can't wait to hear what they do next. - joethebone, Centerfuse.net