There comes a point in everyone’s life when they begin to wonder if it’s time to put away childish things, meet a nice cobalt–thorium G doomsday device, and settle down for good. But there are concerns. Like, am I doing the right thing? What if I’m not ready? Is mutually assured destruction a true deterrent or a military-industrial complex to create a profitable, never-ending series of escalations?
I’m here to tell you how I stopped worrying about all that and learned to love the bomb. But then, things were good but not great, and me and the bomb kind of became more friends than lovers, ya know?
Don’t get me wrong, from the first moment I laid eyes on the bomb, I felt a deep connection. Compared to that, my feelings for assault rifles and tear gas were mere crushes. But the intensity of my feelings towards the bomb freaked me out. What if I’m screwing up and picking the wrong bomb? Is there a hydrogen bomb out there that I might love more? Also, how’s sex gonna work?
But I was able to put that all aside when I realized I wasn’t really worried about the bomb, I was worried about me not being able to love. Well, we were happy for a while. But then time went on and I found myself daydreaming about other weapons of mass destruction, even when I didn’t want to. When I realized I was signing up for a Belorussian dirty bomb’s OnlyFans, I knew we had drifted too far apart.
It wasn’t that I didn’t love the bomb anymore, it was just that the bomb and I were different than we once were. I had grown in one direction and the bomb had been upgraded with a new uranium core that would render the very surface of the planet dead and lifeless. We just weren’t compatible anymore.
I still think about the bomb sometimes, but it feels weird. Like someone else’s memories. At least we’ll always have the dream of destroying all human civilization forever. We’ll always share that.
I’ll be honest, I completely forgot that this record exists. I mean, it has some good songs on it – like, it’s not a bad album overall. It’s just kind of forgettable, especially when you put it up against more developed AJJ records. But in any case, you can thank this review for reminding you as well that “Can’t Maintain” is a thing which you can still listen to.
“Knife Man” probably shouldn’t be this low on the list, but this band has a lot of really great albums and also a couple dumb albums that I mostly need to use as examples for other shit. So there you have – good record, shit ranking.
Look, I know, I know. There’s a lot from this record that does not hold up. And yeah, I’m sure I’m gonna get a whole assload of comments about how they “could never make this record nowadays.” Which is kinda my point. Sometimes you gotta start out writing funny songs about a serial lady killer before you can work your way into that grand concept record about the alien who has a coke problem, or whatever your thing is.
We all had to figure out how to cope with Trump’s presidency in our own ways. This record was AJJ’s. It is also one of the weirder albums in AJJ’s discography, which is really saying something when you take into account that the band actually made and sold salad gloves as merch.
Anybody else listen to this record for the first time and immediately think “you know what, I did have a pretty fucked up childhood. How about that?” Yeah, “The Bible 2” is great for that. Just try listening to it at home first, because if you play it while driving your car on the way to get it inspected then everyone at Jiffy Lube is gonna wonder why you’re crying so much.
Much like the actual Christmas Island, which hosts an annual migration of tens of millions of red crabs to sea to spawn, this album requires no explanation as to its greatness. “Christmas Island” (the album, not the island) is a sonic landmass that is being swarmed by crustaceans. Can you hear it? It sounds clackity.
If you put Woody Guthrie, Barbara Streisand and Simon & Garfunkel in a blender you would likely end up with exactly this album. That’s not a metaphor by the way – if you took an actual blender and mutilated those three artists and also Garfunkel then the resulting viscera would equate to this album. Brutal, catchy, and with a heavy flavor of Marlboro Lights, this is the best AJJ album of all time.
