Pink Reason - We'd Call for Help...

…but we ain’t got a dime. Kevin DeBroux always seems to be living on “Borrowed Time,” it just so happens to be the anthem howled repeatedly in the minute-thirty used to toss off this essential jukebox filler. By now I’m convinced the 7” is the format best suited for Pink Reason, no discredit to the sprawling wallow and desperation of the Cleaning the Mirror LP (like Don Quixote down a deep black tarpit, another entity, another realm entirely), but “Borrowed Time” is the DeBroux of recent days (though it could’ve been recorded in a number of different eras - at 14 in the rec room?), the gutter scum done good, the past an irretrievable blur, the odes to the recently departed Egor Letov and G.G. identified but borne of his own hardcore universe. It’s a choppy, simple, and quick abrasion sonically (three chords and plenty of static) -- verbally it’s one-dimensional graffiti sprayed sloppily on the wall, with no doubt as to the message.

Though he “woke up this morning on a dirty floor, with nothing to eat and nowhere to go,” he doesn’t sound any less worried/wounded about tomorrow. If anything there’s a confidence in his role as teen runaway, intellectual drop-out, harbinger of a fresh-faced, weirdo, soul-draining punk rox. The typical theme of street urchin is inherent (i.e. Suburbia, Pixote, Oliver Twist), just laying out the facts from the road, a mainline bulletin, before moving on to the next inspired squat. The b-side “Scared Shitless” draaaaaags it out into the open, every bit as evocative and baring as the Mirror LP, if less isolated, more harrowing, more blood being shed. Something brief and visceral as this is a perfect foil to the spilling of guts his debut was mucked up in – cathartic abandon, as sharp and determined as the day he decided to become the piper and the proletariat.