Recorded two months before the titular wunderkind (born Milo Aukerman of Lomita, CA) made the trek from Hermosa Beach to UC San Diego, Descendents’ first album sounded the demise of the band's original incarnation; it rivals X’s Wild Gift and Fear’s The Record as L.A.’s superlative punk document. By this point, the band was tighter than ever, and the songs were well-played indeed -- so much so that the gay-bashing and virginal-wrath-as-sour-grapes-neo-Puritanism would come off as merely figurative if not for Aukerman’s pubertal tenor.
His voice brings to mind a stalling El Camino and cakes each mote of pampered suburban ennui in requisite grime and gravel. The lyrics aren’t “funny” anymore than they’re “lyrics,” but an occasional insight along the lines of “You got a baited hook and you’re calling it your cherry/ You want to settle down and you want to get married” damn near elevates them beyond brain droppings.
Thirty seconds into the splatter and fuzz of “Myage,” you want the song to play over the opening titles of every movie you’ll ever see for the rest of your life. It’s a killer. And if the rest of the album doesn’t always match the opener on a hook-for-hook level, the more traditional pile-drivers benefit from Aukerman’s sharp wordplay and charmingly stunted worldview. Things he likes: fishing, The Beatles, true love. Things he hates: whores, posers, PARENTS!!! (three syllables). Things he is not: a loser, a punk, dead.
There’s some softening on the last four songs, both melody-wise (“Bikeage” actually jangles) and thematically, as M.A. pines for a girl looking for love in all the wrong places. On “Hope,” he tells her, “I think it’s right to want someone for all your own/ And not to share her love.” By “Jean Is Dead,” she’s killed herself. See where feelings get you?
