oe Queer of the Queers likes the Ramones: he also likes the Beach Boys, but the Ramones liked the Beach Boys - so mostly, he just likes the Ramones. He writes songs that are stupid. The Ramones’ songs were also stupid, but these are stupid in a suburban secondary-school sense, rather than a vaguely avant-garde, glue-sniffing, KKK-hating sort of stupid.The Queers started in 1982. This is quite a lot of years, and quite a lot of albums, to be putting out self-conciously stupid pop-punk. Blink-182 managed to wear out the formula in far less time, but Blink-182 made the mistake of thinking they were funny. Joe King of the Queers has no such delusions.


So taking the genre-conventions and influences as a starting point, you can count the surprises on Pleasant Screams on one hand. And I will. They are as follows.


One: a number of these songs actually skip the Ramones, being attempts at direct surf-rock era Beach Boys tunes (“Debbie Be True”, “I Never Got the Girl”). This is pleasant in it’s way, but the Queers have none of the harmonies or production of the Beach Boys, and the songs suffer accordingly.


Two: some of their punk songs have underlying dance-pop rhythms. This is pretty cool.


Three: “You Just Gotta Blow My Mind”, with Gretchen Smear on lead vocals is a straight-ahead dance-pop song. It isn’t very good.


Four: The song “Homo” is gay-positive, lyrically defending the title character from all of the mean girls who make fun of me. Of course the fact that they manage to turn this sadly admirable reversal into casual misogyny is dispiriting, but it is sort of weird. About half-way through Pleasant Screams, any weirdness at all is appreciated.


And five: the closing track, “Molly Neuman”, is bizarrely ambitions, the song taking about 15 seconds to fade all the way in and then refusing to go away, reprising various bits of previous songs and it’s self, as well as out-of-character sheets of noise. This doesn’t seem to serve any purpose other than to trap the listener in the album – which it does pretty well. So instead of just being another stupid album in your collection, it tries to make a case for itself as the only album, merely by refusing to end. It brings you down to its level, forcing you to dig into the hooks.


I’m keeping it. I don’t know why.