Yank Crime (1994)

Yank Crime is the second and final album by the San Diego, California post-hardcore band Drive Like Jehu, released on April 26, 1994, by Interscope Records. It was the band's major-label debut and its artwork was created by singer/guitarist Rick Froberg. The band toured in support of the album but then quietly disbanded the following year as the members moved off to pursue other interests.

In later years, as guitarist John Reis found international recognition with his band Rocket from the Crypt, a gradually growing audience began to pinpoint Drive Like Jehu's music as a catalyst for the eclectic San Diego music scene and the emerging national emo scene of the 1990s. In 2003 Reis re-released Yank Crime on his Swami Records label, including on it the songs from the band's "Hand Over Fist" / "Bullet Train to Vegas" single and the original version of "Sinews" that had appeared on the compilation Head Start to Purgatory.

Reception

Initial

Initial reviews of Yank Crime were largely positive. Shortly after the album's release, The Stanford Daily's Andy Radin called it "a '90s classic" and singled out the song "Super Unison" as its best track ("its raucous first half lead into a long, quiet build-up into a short, intense, orgiastic conclusion"). Writing for The Boston Phoenix, Kevin McDonough noted that " maelstrom of guitar and drums propel all nine songs, so it hardly matters that the arrangements aren't filled with many surprises: the high-quality production (by the band) along with the steady beat and insane shouting vocal style of Rick Froberg put this album a cut above the usual thrash fest." In Trouser Press, Deborah Sprague found the "more viscerally fractious" album "a good deal more compelling: “Here Come the Rome Plows” and the disorienting “Luau” find Froberg sounding like a man pleading for help as the guitar undertow pulls him down for the third and final time."

Its reception in the British music press was similarly positive. Melody Maker published a rave review of the album from Cathi Unsworth, who described it as "the kind of gut-quaking, elegant sonic violence we Brits find so hard to emulate without being bogged down in too many layers of depression or aloof cool. It's [sic] is an instinctive, lip-curling and goddamn exhilarating good rumble." A more mixed review came from Select, with critic Andrew Perry calling the album a "naggingly unpoppy take on post-hardcore power play" in comparison to Rocket from the Crypt that "fall into an occasionally dreary middle ground between Superchunk and Fugazi."

Legacy

Brendan Reid of Pitchfork rated the 2003 reissue of the album 9.0 out of 10, remarking that "Opening an album with a song as bracingly great as 'Here Come the Rome Plows' would be a shot in the foot for almost any other band, with its snakepit verses and a chorus that goes from balled-up fists to open arms and back again before you can take a breath. 'Golden Brown' does the same in almost half the time. These more straightforward songs sting like snowballs packed with rock-hard chunks of melody, and in each case, Froberg's voice abrades the solid lines down to the bare minimum, and the band fills in the resulting space with pure venom." He also commented on the album's significance to emo, saying "It's often easy to forget that DLJ were considered emo in their day; Froberg's howls of 'Ready, ready to let you in!' on 'Super Unison' seem like a sick parody of stylish vulnerability. Then the song mutates into a gorgeous, snare-drum rolling open sea, and everything you've ever liked (and still like) about this genre in its purest form comes flooding back." The album's significance to the emo genre was also noted by Ned Raggett of AllMusic, who wrote: "Perhaps even more than [their 1992 debut album], Yank Crime solidified Drive Like Jehu's reputation as kings of emo. While use of that term rapidly degenerated to apply to sappy miserableness by the decade's end, here the quartet capture its original sense, wired, frenetic, screaming passion, as first semi-created by the likes of Rites of Spring."