Punk Rock Flashback Friday: Post Mortem

Jump into that rocketship and time travel back to the early 1980s right smack into the stiff upper lip of ol’ Beantown. I’m not talking about inner city beer slopping back alley Boston; I’m talking about the streets of the suburbs. Sure they still get beat up by those brutal winter snow squalls and the ozone depleting Aquanet fueled hair that fumigates the aisles of Bradlees. It’s a tough place to be a suburban warrior. There’s nothing more appropriate than being an outcast.

Worse than the inner city, suburbs are a tinderbox for angst, aggression, and creativity. I mean, how else do you self-reflect and understand these hormone-engorged feelings than to start a band and rock furiously. Post Mortem began and said up yours to extracurriculars. Instead, they rushed home to practice every day. Vocalist John McCarthey said it best:

“Our whole concept was that we honestly didn’t give a fuck. That’s why we’re lumped in with punk rock as well as metal.” I think that’s what they call thrash in the big city!

They released their debut album, Coroner’s Office in 1986. When you listen to the band, you get this secondary boner for weird music structure and jazz stylings that exist for better or worse. At this moment, I have to profess that there is a level of experimentation that should be celebrated.

Prior to the 1990s, Seth Putnam from Anal Cunt flirted with joining the band and in 1990, he did after AC’s first breakup. By 1992, Putnam was out. In comes Destined For Failure. Here we experience Mark Kelley on bass, Rick McIver on drums, John Alexander on guitar, and McCarthy.

You could call the album sloppy transgression, but what the band accomplished was creating a tempo and style like having an eight-year-old drive a vehicle. It’s dangerous and borderline catastrophic, but here they are keeping between the lines and doing something bands like Jesus Lizard compounded on.

“I Like Pinball & Pool, I Work In An Arcade During the Summer,” encompasses the feeling of a constant schizophrenia. The songwriting is the equivalent to someone telling a story at random. “Dazzle Me With Your Knowledge of the Fine Arts,” is sludgy mudrucking that illuminates the agony in their personal drive and utter madness from a story about drowning from a lack of ambition. This is art rock in the way you call Mr. Bungle art rock. “Winner’s Circle” bastardizes psychedelic while “Pigeon Boy” is community center chaos.

McCarthy unfortunately passed away in 2009 and the band went on to release one more album soon after, Message From The Dead. Putnam had this to say about him, “He was one of my best friends of all time. I could say bad things about him but I won’t because the good times outweigh the bad. In 2008, we played a show in California with Anal Blast and The Meat Shits. People were taking bets if I would die first or Don Decker from Anal Blast. Don died like a year later.”

Post Mortem was one of Boston’s metal pioneers who were not afraid to dabble in punk ideology. It showed up in their slacker lyrics and their fuck off ideology. They did what they wanted to do and both metal and punk fans in Boston rejoiced in their unabashed attitude.