The science of punk: Good things come to those who wait

THE Descendents have only released seven albums in 35 years, but it’s the quality, not the quantity.

Milo Aukerman (second from right) with the Descendents.

CALIFORNIAN punk-pop pioneers the Descendents are ­hardly what one would call a prolific group, having ­released only six more albums since their debut full-length Milo Goes to College came out in 1982.

But the 12 years ­between 2004 album Cool to Be You and last year’s Hypercaffium Spazzinate was a long stretch, even by their standards.

Nevertheless, good things come to those who wait, and the album received almost unanimous praise from critics and was the highest charting of the band’s career, debuting in the top 20 both here and in the US when it came out last July.

When The Courier-Mail caught up with vocalist Milo Aukerman prior to the band’s 2013 tour, he was juggling his career as a biochemist with his duties as singer for the band. At the time Descendents were only performing sporadically, due in no small part to the band members’ commitments to their day jobs.

In addition to Aukerman’s biochemistry work, ­drummer Bill Stevenson helms Colorado recording studio The Blasting Room, guitarist Stephen Egerton mixes and masters records and runs Armstrong Studios in ­Oklahoma, and bassist Karl Alvarez has played with a ­variety of other groups, notably the Lemonheads.

The Descendents’ albums have been few and far between.

Since then, however, Aukerman, 54, has swapped the microscope for the microphone and touring with the band has become more regular, although Aukerman hastens to add they are content to play “about 60 shows a year ­instead of 200” these days.

“I was strongarmed into doing something else (at work) that I wasn’t really keen on and that was kind of the beginning of the end for me,” Aukerman says.

“Instead of working with plant DNA I was working on bacteria. So once that happened I started to warm to the fact of just hitting the eject button and not doing it any more.

“As I was mulling over my options, they laid me off, so that was good timing and I haven’t really looked back.”

Despite the longer-than-usual break between albums, Aukerman says “most songs originated from 2010 to 2014”.

“It’s not like the album took us 12 years, it only took three or four years,” Aukerman laughs.

“But even so, we’d like to put another record out in the next few years and not wait another 12; that’s only fair to the fans.”

The band’s tried and true formula of melodic hardcore and fast-paced pop-punk coupled with relatable, autobiographical lyrical content remains, although much of the subject matter has matured along with the band members.

“We need to talk about things that are relevant to us now,” Aukerman says.

“We have families, we have kids, and the songs are going to reflect our current realities, so we’re not going to be singing about how to score some high-school chick or something like that; we’ve got to talk about what’s really bugging us now in our lives.

No song illustrates this approach better than No Fat Burger, an update to their 1981 song I Like Food with lyrics more befitting of a group of men in their 50s: “Can’t have no more juicy burgers/Can’t have no more greasy fries/Doctor took my lipid profile/He told me I’m barely alive.”

Another standout is Shameless Halo, which takes aim at the increasing influence the religious Right has had on ­political policy in the US in recent years.

“Karl wrote that and all the band members are pretty much on the same page,” Aukerman says.

“The argument that you hear back from people is, ‘well, even the founding fathers were religious’, and that may be the truth, but that doesn’t mean that religious preachers have to dictate the rights of the people and should be entering into debates about women’s bodies and women’s reproductive rights.”

When Qweekend caught up with Aukerman, US President Donald Trump had not yet signed his executive order banning immigration and travel from seven Muslim-­dominated countries, but had announced cuts to science and research funding, something Aukerman obviously abhors.

“The Congress has already taken the hatchet to funding, Trump is just sealing the deal at this point,” he says.

“Part of the approach and the strategy of this adminis­tration is to just not accept reality and not accept facts.

“You obviously heard about the women’s march, well there’s going to be a scientists’ march coming up in the next few months where scientists are going to get together to try to ensure science doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.”

Descendents, Eatons Hill Hotel, February 22, $79.70, oztix.com.au

Aukerman predicts a scientists’ march to follow the women’s march.

Originally published as The science of punk: Good things come to those who wait