In the 1980s, street punk kids laughed at the bands whose members dressed in sharp mod clothes and paisley ties, got themselves some 12-string Rickenbackers, and devoted themselves fully to note-perfect re-creations of the sounds of the mid-'60s. Well, the paisley underground kids can have the last laugh, because 20 years later, kids from a new generation are devoting themselves to note-perfect re-creations of early '80s Oi! From their on-the-nose name to song titles like "Who Writes Your Rules" and "Who Controls the Media" ("Who Put the Bomp" and "Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy's Ovaltine," sadly, have already been taken, although that didn't stop these guys from nicking the title "The Process of Weeding Out" from
Black Flag's instrumental EP of the same title) to their strictly by-the-numbers three-chord ramalama (they even punctuate their choruses with shouts of "Oi! Oi! Oi!," for crying out loud!) to their ongoing obsession with Stanley Kubrick's film version of A Clockwork Orange,
the Lower Class Brats are an Austin-based band that would give its collective right arm to be
Peter & the Test Tube Babies,
the Angelic Upstarts, or some other Cockney rejects from around 1981. This collection of singles going back to the mid-'90s is vaguely interesting in the same way that a
Lyres or Chesterfield Kings record was back in the mid-'80s, but equally as disposable. ~ Stewart Mason