I’m pretty sure if whoever owns the Tony Hawk games listened to Let’s Go Home, they’d get cracking on Tony Hawk 9 or whatever it is now.
There are probably not many ways a young midwestern kid growing up in an evangelical house in the early 2000s could have discovered punk music. Skateboarding was one, for me, listening to the bands my friends would blare from their cars while skating at the local park, with its clearly not designed with physics in mind half-pipes and cracked ramps.
The other, related to actual skating, was the GameCube exclusive Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland. In a childhood mostly full of electric piano ballads singing about Jesus, the sort of chaos from *gasp* Green Day was scandalizing, let alone the immense silliness of Thunderlords or the politics of Dead Kennedys.
This new track from punk/garage four-piece Best Dressed Ghost belongs on this soundtrack, which is as much praise as I can imagine giving a piece of music, to be honest. Even the band’s copy screams the sort of hand-drawn-howdy-fuck-you energy that young me found so terrifying and incredible as a little evangelical lad.
best dressed ghost is a four piece from New Jersey that has an in-your-face live show that some have described as “extremely loud” and “jesus christ.” – excerpt from their website
The production rides its several lines extremely well, balancing the noisome energy and refusal to be hyper-clean with its surf groove and constant dynamic shifts. This song is almost pop, which feels like an insane thing to say, but it has that thing that great pop has: a new little earworm added every few seconds. Doubled vocals, a drum groove changeup, a new introduction to the Beach-Boys-in-Hell riff the song is built around, it’s a song you’ll be chanting at random days after you take your headphones off.
I only hope that listening to this over and over doesn’t result in me breaking my shin again trying to do a kickflip.
Great for fans of: Ecca Vandal, any of the Tony Hawk soundtracks, surf music?
Written by Willow Stonebeck
