In 1990, Jawbreaker — a Bay Area pop-punk trio featuring Blake Schwarzenbach (guitars/vocals), Adam Pfahler (drums) and Chirs Bauermeister (bass) — released their debut album, Unfun. Their mix of deceptively sweet melodies, unrelenting power and Schwarzenbach’s punk-Bukowsi lyricism made them one of the most influential groups of the ’90s, and their fingerprints are all over much of the rock that took over mainstream radio in the mid-2000s. We talked to Schwarzenbach and Pfahler about the reissue of Unfun (out this week), Jawbreaker’s legacy and the band’s future. Grab a download of Unfun’s “Gutless” at the end of the post (and hear it right here!):
Does listening to this album take you back to where you were when you were making it?
Pfahler: Yeah, it was nostalgic for me. But the nostalgia was a bit short-lived. I had to listen to the stuff really obsessively because I was working on the remastering process.
Schwarzenbach: I hadn’t listened to it since it came out. I’ve always found it pretty challenging to listen to stuff that I’ve recorded. [Unfun] is so dense and, I would say, overwritten, but not in a critical way. It’s such dense music that I’m astounded that we were doing that.
There’s the cliché that bands wait their entire lives to make their first record and when that opportunity comes they pour absolutely everything into it.
Schwarzenbach: That was the feeling in the band, that we only had that one record. And it was such a rare thing to make an album that we went at it pretty intensely.
Jawbreaker is heavily associated with the Bay Area punk scene, but Unfun was largely written while you were at college in New York, right, Blake?
Schwarzenbach: I wrote a lot of those songs on 16th street and 3rd Ave. We kind of quickly arranged them into band form...
Article Source: Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily