It's late 1995.

You're a couple months shy of twenty years old, and though technically a college student, you can't remember the last time you attended a class. You spend your evenings driving back and forth to the well-known college town approximately 45 miles to the east of your current residence for name musical events, or attend loud, sloppy punk rock shows at a dilapidated house two blocks from your own mediocre state university. You know the place, right? Some fall-down joint with a rotting front porch overflowing with rusty bicycles and mildewed sofas. You're not really sure who's paying rent, or if anyone is paying rent at all. The place smells like shit, and the show attendees drive you crazy with their politics and gratuitous displays of testosterone (chances are, if you're female, you're the clear minority), but it's better than bickering with your roommate over rent, and every now and then you have a really great time.

It's the messy nostalgia factor, and Karp's posthumous singles collection, Action Chemistry, reminds me of all the sweaty, drunken nights I spent trying like hell to not get trampled, and the times I surprised everyone (though mostly myself) when I loudly declared during the silence at the end of the show, "Goddamn, that fucking rocked."

I didn't see Karp in 1995. The bands I saw then were usually loud, but lacking both musical proficiency and a sense of humor. Karp was endowed with an impressive amount of both. Much has been made of their metal influences-- think the bastard child of the Melvins and Black Sabbath, occasionally joined by a hardcore-loving session musician with an affinity for uppers, Black Flag, and Animal from "The Muppet Show"-- and as for the humor thing, well, it's hard not to like a band that adds a detail like this in the liner notes: "Recorded with a live bear in the studio. That was tough."

In fact, disliking this band is difficult when you find yourself raising the devil horns and headbanging in earnest to "Turkey Named Brotherhood," with its dead-on fucking metal guitar line and unintelligible screamed vocals. It's hard not to laugh. And it's okay, because you know Karp is laughing with you.

In their day, Karp were notorious for their wrestling-wear, and lyrical allusions to The Wizard of Oz and the roller derby. They recorded three full-lengths for K, attracted some rather high-profile fans within the music community (Built to Spill's Doug Martsch has been spotted wearing Karp t-shirts on numerous occasions), and allowed their fans the pleasure of balls-out rock and roll absurdity without having to prefix the pleasure with "guilty." Consider the opener, "Rowdy," the first track on Karp's last EP. A completely brutal, totally hilarious alcoholic older cousin of the Fucking Champs' progged-out meditations on the same genre, this track makes terrific use of its technical intricacy, never wiping the smirk off its face.

With Karp, the silliness factor tempers the bombast just enough that you can sit back on second listen and enjoy the hodgepodge of sounds beneath the noise without feeling like too much of a hesher. Both "Dusk" and "Blue Blood" employ the dirge-to-explosion, quiet/loud dynamics of the artier set, but allow for all the strutting metal affectations to seep through. Likewise, the speed metal uproar of "Gauze" resolves itself into a raucous classic rock kind of conclusion, which would be completely preposterous if not for its defiantly lo-fi sound. The album fills out with a virtually unintelligible Black Flag cover, "Nothing Left Inside," and the terrifically titled "I'd Rather Be Clogging," with its slow-to-build, full-on guitar assault at the conclusion.

Action Chemistry might lack subtlety, but that's sort of the point, isn't it? I mean, if you're looking for breezy, complex pop songs, this obviously isn't the place to go. This is not music for the Merlot crowd. It's loud and unruly, and if they ever invent scratch-and-sniff CDs, this one would smell like the interior of a shitty dive the morning after an amateur cock-rock show. But the damn thing charmed me. Something about undistilled rock without the bells and whistles. Something about being sure these guys had a lot of fun doing this. Something about the way it makes me want to stock my pockets with cheap beer and go to a bad house show just to make sure I'm not missing anything really great.

Goddamn, that fucking rocked.

-Alison Fields, January 10th, 2002