Everything Is So Scary

Priests “New”

Priests are a punk band, and they’re good at it. This is important to say because the sort of things they do very well – convey urgency, project defiant aggression, give off a general vibe of violence and danger – are all conventions of the genre that many untalented bands can barely handle. The thing that frustrates me about a band like this is that while they nail these things, they seem indifferent to pushing beyond convention. And I think that’s a fair enough thing a lot of the time – most music is part of some tradition or another – but that eagerness to conform to expectations seems at odds with the sentiment of the music. This is the problem of punk rock, really – people are so brainwashed into thinking that it’s all transgressive and cool that most people working within it don’t realize how conservative their art is. There’s a lot of power and venom in this band, but they’re still new – I’d like to think that they might do something more bold with their music later on. I’m not gonna count on it, though.

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