Retro Recommendation: Punky Bruster - Cooked On Phonics

Once a week I'll turn the blog over to Dan Marsicano for his Retro Recommendation, giving you a chance to learn about underrated and overlooked gems from metal's past.  Punky Bruster is in this week's spotlight.

In the mid '90s, pop punk was the "it" music. Green Day, Rancid, and The Offspring all released groundbreaking albums that the mainstream clung onto with open arms. A ton of wannabe bands started up, all looking for the same type of impact these bands had. Millions of people ate up the pop punk drivel that was shoveled into our skulls day in and day out. Devin Townsend, on the other hand, was angry and bitter about this scenario and used the side-project Punky Brüster to get out his frustration at the record industry.

1996's Cooked On Phonics was the only album from Punky Brüster. Written and recorded in less than a month, this concept album is about a Polish death metal band that transforms overnight into a pop punk band to critical and commercial acclaim. However, the band members struggle with their metal identity, constantly clashing with their new-found punk mindset. Hilariously twisted, the story is told by a side-cracking narrator with harsh words of wisdom and a slurring lisp.

The only death metal-sounding sections occur in the opening track "Recipe For Bait" and the vicious "Metal Dilemma." The rest of the songs are structured around three-chord pop punk. Simplistic riffs and linear song structures are what Townsend and company do best. The band openly mocks every conventional aspect of the genre, from the faux posing to the need for stupid wallet chains to look more hardcore. The lyrics are witty and crude, with song titles like "Heinous Anus" keeping things as classy as humanly possible.

The songs tend to get repetitive, but that is actually to the album's benefit in emphasizing just how lame the pop punk movement really was. For an album that was written so quickly, Cooked on Phonics has a lot of great material for open-minded metal heads. The infectious "Fake Punk" and "Oats Peas Beans & Barley" will get glued into the listener's head, while the melodic "Picture of Myself" sounds like a lost track from Foo Fighters' self-titled debut.

Obviously, a concept album knocking the music industry didn't exactly set the Billboard charts on fire. In a career full of underrated gems, Cooked on Phonics may be the brightest one of them all. The album can be seen as a precursor to the equally-wacky Ziltoid the Omniscient. For being the first hilarious concept album from Townsend, Cooked on Phonics gets the nod for this week's Retro Recommendation.