Before this monstrosity hit my mailbox the only concept album that I own was Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade. Even that double album by those St. Paul hardcore pioneers isn't even that good for a concept album as it ends up being all a dream. I thought that trick only worked on 80's prime time sitcoms. I really don't like concept albums because it always reminds of what a bloated corpse rock became in the late 70's and early 80's. Bands like Yes and Styx were writing rock opuses about robots and Excalibur. Even Kiss put out The Elder. Kiss, the band that originally wanted to rock 'n roll all night and party every day, was writing fairy tales.
Punk rock came around in the late 70's at the height of concept-album rock pompous surfeit. Punk rock laid waste to rock operas, arena rock, and everything else that turned bands into near gods. It brought the music back to the fans. The concept album went almost the way of the dodo as bands shortened their songs, spiked their hair, and nihilist narcissism was slapped every snarled nose pierced mug across the world.
I'm not saying punk rock wasn't completely void of the concept album. I know Crass put out a couple, there's the before mentioned Zen Arcade and every Fugazi album after Repeater may or may not be a concept album. Nevertheless, when you think "concept album," it conjures up images of grizzled forty-year-old men in front of keytars or twelve-string guitars composing ballads about Merlin. Punk rock was about real-life anger not daydreams and fantasies.
Yet here we are in 2008, small time movie maker and actor Shannon Saint Ryan gets together with Kirsten Patches from the criminally horrible Naked Aggression and the Jason Cruz from the criminally overrated Stung Out to make an album about a graphic novel. The T4 Project encompassed seven studios and two continents as Shannon, Kirsten, and Jason collected musicians like the Blues Brothers trying to get the band back together. There's ten songs that tell the story of boy meets girl they fall in love, smash the state, get arrested and other punk rock things. Throughout these ten tracks there could be anyone from Spike T. Smith from the Damned to Mike Carter from Glass and Ashes and anyone from Pennywise, Buzzocks, Bad Religion, etc. in between. Also to fill up space are some annoying commercials performed by Shannon that test your intelligence as he beats the dead horse on universal medical care, meat being bad, McDonald's being horrible, ad nauseam . We get it Shannon, actually anyone into punk rock from Warped Tour tour gets it.
The music sounds like every excruciating horrible Bad Religion song written no matter who is playing. Jason Cruz sings on every song as he plays the role of Punk Rock Boy and Kirsten Patches screeching in from time to time as the female lead. The songs are boring, placid, and they somewhat reminded me of "We are the World" in its bloated exorbitance expect "We Are the World" helped people. As far as I can tell The T4 Project doesn't help anyone starving in any third world nation. And here I was hoping for Blake Schwarzenbach doing his best Joe Cocker impression wailing out, "It's a choice we're making...". If that would of happened The T4 Project's Story-Based Concept would be my favorite collaborative concept album of all time.
Sadly, no snarled Blake makes an appearance and all this album encompasses is being a overwrought, turgid, rock album that hides under the guise of punk rock. The circus of punk rock stars that contribute to this album is impressive but the music isn't anything you haven't heard No Use for a Name, NOFX, or even Strung Out try to mesh out as a radio hit. The "commercials" are borderline moronic in their attempts to push issues by using Family Guy-type irony. This album wasn't assembled to help starving people or even to get pets neutered. There's no reason why this album should exist. All The T4 Project does is fulfill some small time actor's punk rock pipe dream. It's surely ambitious but nevertheless The T4 Project isn't much of a stretch from Styx singing about world domination by robots. Just because The T4 Project isn't singing about a Terminator world and touches on boycotting and taking a stand against society doesn't make this concept album any less than a waste of mine and everyone else's time.
