It's often said that virtuosic musicians "make it look easy." A skill can become so honed by practice and talent that its execution, while seeming effortless, really masks a massive prior effort. Finland's Kakka-Hätä 77, in the best punk tradition, make it "look easy" for the opposite reason: they really do seem to have just picked up their instruments, barely rehearsed, and come up with a battery of catchy, irreverent tunes on the spot. Sloppy and catchy in equal measure, these performances look easy because it seems that you have known these melodies your whole life--they had only to stumble into existence.Resembling nothing so much as Rancid's …And Out Come the Wolves album--though perhaps the Vibrators would be a more fashionable touchstone--Kakka-Hätä 77 are so instantly tuneful that they barely need a write-up (as if there was some hermeneutic key needed to unlock their sound!). Instead, the band overflows with neat little parts, proving the infinite pleasures of moving around the basic elements of rock music without pretentious supplement or the overlaying of a conceptual gloss. This is party music meant to be played into the ground.Kakka-Hätä 77, whose name in Finnish is a child's expression for "I have to take a shit!" with punk's banner year '77 meaninglessly appended, come from a fine tradition of poppy Finnish punk. At the top of my list is Ratsia, Eppu Normaali, 013, and Nolla Nolla Nolla. But, in a certain sense, catchy punk is catchy punk. We all remember the scene in "High Fidelity" where the record store clerks trick a teenager into thinking that Stiff Little Fingers' "Suspect Device" is the new Green Day song. It's not that Green Day particularly sound like Stiff Little Fingers (the script's misguided pretension)--rather, all of this music gloriously runs together.The familiarity and the apparent spontaneity of Kakka-Hätä 77, however, belies how rare good music of this kind is. If it looks like any three kids in a garage could throw this together in an afternoon, in fact the musical landscape is littered with (what I call) un-catchy catchy music: pop-punk or lo-fi rock that has all the trappings of tuneful pop… but doesn't "stick." The decline of Weezer is another (increasingly dragged-out) testimony to the perils of this road! This difficulty is why bands end up playing "dress up." Kakka-Hätä 77 embodies the Black Flag look and ethos of, "Here we are, where should we set up?", never turning the lack of an image into an image itself. For all the sheer obviousness of their riffs and charming waggishness of their idea of punk, it could be a while before one hears any new band this fun and cool.@misfitsfanPreviously - Judgement
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