Sounds From The Junkshop #71 - Andrew W.K.

 

"We know what we want and we get it from you! We do what we like and we like what we do!" - Andrew WK - Party Hard

I mentioned a few weeks ago while writing the Garbage Days Revisited column on Zodiac Mindwarp how if you're going to be remembered as a one hit wonder then you might as well at least make sure that song is an absolute killer. So it was with Andrew W.K. some fifteen odd years after Zod had his brief brush with fame. There's an oft asked question (well, among the circle of rockers I go for drinks with nowadays anyhow) of "if you could hear a song for the first time again, what would it be?" Well, there's a few but right up there would be this little number...

It's easy to forget now but there was a time for about 5 minutes in the dying days of 2001 and early 2002 when Andrew WK was legitimately right there on top of the mountain. The first time you heard Party Hard, it knocked you across the room like a left hook from Tyson - sheer undeniable rock 'n' roll energy which pretty much issued an open invitation to scream the lyrics, leap around the room like a mad person and bang your head until your neck snapped for 185 glorious seconds. When it crashed into the Top 20, it was telling that it debuted one place higher than Limp Bizkit's new single and it felt like a changing of the guard was definitely afoot as people had started to realise what a one-trick pony nu-metal was.

The trouble is of course that, rather like looking back at what you thought was an awesome night after ten pints in the cold light of day and realising that you got thrown out of the rock club for trying to punch someone, insulted your best mates and threw up on your best pair of DM's before passing out with your face in a donner kebab, it didn't take too much to realise that Andrew WK only really had the one trick up his sleeve and the novelty quickly wore off. His debut album I Get Wet sounded flippin' awesome the first time you heard it, a 30 minute full force blast of rock 'n' roll dynamite but the heartbreaking truth is that it just didn't bear up to repeated listening at all. Even as early as the second or third time you heard it, you noticed that nearly all of the songs were essentially Party Hard in a different key. His second single She Is Beautiful missed the Top 40 altogether and it was basically all piling dirt on the coffin from thereon out. Of course, as you can probably imagine, in the live arena it worked almost perfectly and the three gigs of his I went to around this time (twice when he toured and once at Leeds Festival) were great fun with stage divers left, right and centre and all of us losing about half our body weight in sweat through excess pogoing and screaming.

I did actually buy Andrew WK's second album The Wolf in a sale about a year after it came out and to be fair it did show a bit of growth from his debut with a couple of darker more melodic moments in with the self-explanatory likes of Long Live The Party but by this point it was way too late - the guy had been written off as a one hit wonder, the frat-punk scene he'd found himself (arguably erroneously) lumped in with had long since become a thing of the past and it came and went with very little fanfare on this side of the Atlantic (although it did respectably in his native US).

Similar to other bands who briefly entered into my consciousness around this time (Lit and Bowling For Soup to name but two), Andrew WK is another one of those artists who occasionally pass back into my orbit as a music reviewer. I remember a friend of mine reviewing an album of his called 55 Cadillac which was a mixture of classical piano and freeform jazz (!) which had rumours swirling around it to the effect that it was essentially written by a different person using the Andrew WK pseudonym with one particularly far-out conspiracy theory even stating that the original Andrew WK was dead! (I should point out that weird shit like this seems to follow Mr WK around like an especially clingy puppy - even at the peak of his fame, I remember one kook on the Internet claiming that the guy was in fact Dave Grohl in disguise!). More recently, in 2018, he made a musical comeback on the back of working as a motivational speaker for the past decade (which kind of figures) with an album called You Are Not Alone. I reviewed it for Pure Rawk and gave it 6/10 saying that it would likely appeal to his fans (and make no mistake, there are several out there who weirdly still reckon the guy's a genius including a few friends of mine) but that overall it just sounded a bit silly really coming nearly two decades on from his hit.

I get the feeling Andrew WK will still be out there urging overgrown kids and fortysomething fratboys who still love stuff like Jackass and South Park to party till they puke for as long as he's able and, you know what, fair play to 'im. For me, the spell was sadly pretty much broken some time around the third or fourth time I listened to I Get Wet but like I say, for better or worse, Party Hard will always conjure up plenty of fun memories of necking a beer and bawling along to it at rock clubs. Like I say, even if it did pretty much just last for one song, it's a hell of a song to lay down as your marker and that's why he's in this column. Party on indeed.