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I moved to Chicago in 1995, during the heady days of pop-punk. While my tastes ran to the Mr. T Experience/Sicko/Screeching Weasel kind of stuff, NOFX had made really speedy pop songs played with great precision the favored style of many bands. I personally usually found that these bands' speed was impressive, but that the speed came at the expense of the song itself, since everything sounded so rushed and not natural.
I'd heard of Lifetime, a New Jersey hardcore outfit, but had never heard them, and was told I would enjoy them. Sometime in 1996, I picked up this 7" (I think it was at the Dummyroom, but it could have been Reckless or Quaker Goes Deaf - I'm so old school) to check them out.
I was immediately worried that this was another good song played way too fast, as they come out of the gate blazing, but just before the halfway point (at 29 seconds!), they slow it way down - what would be "the breakdown" for many bands - and keep it up all the way to the end. This is a headbanging, fist-in-the-air jam for sure.
Flipping the record over, we get an almost Screeching Weasel-y slab of pop punk, with a basic but catchy melody over a wall of guitars and a nice tight rhythm section. Oddly enough, there's not really a verse-chorus structure to the song. It's more like a verse, then a bridge, then a middle eight, but the middle eight lasts from 49 seconds all the way to the end of the song, with the exception of the ending reprise of the verse chords, albeit in "breakdown" form again, just once through the progression. Thus, this song strikes a nifty balance between the predictability of the melody and the unorthodox nature of the structure.
I know a lot of people for whom Lifetime means a lot, but I never liked anything more than this single. I found their albums to be full of the played-way-too-fast-for-their-own-good songs, and never bothered with them. This lil' record still holds up for me, though.
"...swamps of Jersey" is a flat out jam!
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