Mean Jeans

About

Photo by: Jacob McCann L-R: Junior Jeans, Billy Jeans, Jeans Wilder From the moment they started 15 years ago, Mean Jeans have been creating their own slime punk fantasy world. Study their six previous album covers and you’ll find junkyards full of bongs and yo-yos, macaroni galaxies, Jägermeister spaceships, alien saxophonists and pink slugs in bondage dripping ooze. On their newest full-length album Blasted , the goofball trio have clearly been through wild years and seen some shit—on the cover, the three members peer out of toxic waste bins, no longer cartoons of themselves but instead incredulous country-fried maniacs who are still following a slime punk dream, and dealing with where it’s led them. Which isn’t to say the Jeans are jaded. In fact, the band—Billy Jeans, Houndy and Junior Jeans—seem to be having as much fun as ever on this record, ripping through these 15 rapid fire ear worms without coming up for air. They seem equally focused on tight catchy songwriting and packing in Easter eggs and absurd lyrical references, including (but certainly not limited to) Tim Armstrong’s X-Files cameo, Mike Schank’s PCP overdose story in American Movie, multiple songs with lyrics about their space-obsessed kindred pop-punker Tom DeLonge, a chorus borrowed from Seal, and a not-very-legal piano collage of well-known pop-punk melodies. Anyway, this record is a frantic and frenetic joyride, though probably one made in Rick from Rick And Morty’s Space Cruiser and through time and space, rather than any form of road-based vehicle here on Earth. But that energy was probably enhanced by the fact the band recorded Blasted all by themselves here on this planet. Well, at The Trash Treasury in Portland, OR, at any rate—the city where the band first got together and which is one of the least Earth-like cities on, well, Earth. At their own behest, the trio were left entirely to their own devices, putting themselves through their own physical paces by trying to be in two places—the