Song Showcase - The Break by Urge Overkill

Urge Overkill is one of my favorite bands, and their 1995 album Exit The Dragon is a strong contender for my favorite album. It was a claustrophobic, frantic and desperate piece of music. This is post Cobain alternative rock done right. It might not be the best introduction for the band. That would go to their previous album, Saturation which was a much more accessible, and honestly, a considerably more fun album that depicted the band's persona better than anything else ever did with the exception of their brilliant cover of Neil Diamond's Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon off of the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, which is what most people know them for. Before you listen to The Break, I'd recommend clicking on that link and maybe this next one, which goes to Sister Havana, which I think defines them better than The Break does. It's about going down to Cuba and having a fling with a girl who turns out to be Fidel Castro's girlfriend.

But The Break, which was the lead single off of Exit The Dragon was the second Urge Overkill song I ever heard, after Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon. It's not really what the band was about. They were cocky, over the top, a bit pretentious and had this smug self awareness to them that is either charming or infuriating, depending on whether you like them or not. The Break however, is them at the height of their powers creatively when it was all falling apart due to addiction, excess and continued mainstream disinterest. If Saturation was their equivalent of Big Star's #1 Record, then Exit The Dragon is a combination of Radio City and Third/Sister Lovers. It's bleak, raw and at the same time, a fantastic pop/rock album. And The Break is the defining track off of it.

It's very minimal. The only instruments I can make out are guitars (and very nineties rock sounding guitars), drums and percussion. If I listen very closely, I can faintly make out bass. King Roeser, the band's bassist sings lead here as he did on most of the album, like he did before guitarist (and vocal powerhouse) Nash Kato took over most of the vocal work on Saturation.

The guitars crash like a wrecking ball and cut like a jagged, rusty knife at the same time. I don't know which band members are laying which instruments, since in the video, Kato and Roeser are both shown playing guitar and bass at different points, so I can't really assign credit with certainty for it, but the guitar work here is just amazing. This is one of my favorite guitar tracks ever. Roeser's voice matches the sound of the guitars. His voice was always ragged and ghostly, like he's been screaming, smoking and drinking whiskey all night, but here, it's even moreso than usual, and it's very appealing, because he knows how to make that vocal style work. Right before the first chorus, he belts out "I can't get a break," which is to me, the moment that sums up the album perfectly.

Which brings us to the drummer, Blackie Onassis. The guy is one of the most underrated drummers in rock music. He goes back and forth between forceful and yet subdued to frantic and yet precise brilliantly here. One of the things that nobody talks about about these guys is how good of a drummer that Onassis was. The drumming here is just as good as the guitar work and vocals.

Also, fans of the cartoon series Daria might recognize this song, as it was featured on an episode of the series, which is pretty cool. Daria's great, Urge Overkill's great... why not get some chocolate in that peanut butter? Of course, there's a part of me that thinks that the guys who breathed new life into Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon probably shouldn't have anything to do with a TV show about a girl Daria's age...