It’s sure fun to talk about how those charming, fuzzy bundles of love in new-school pop-punk outfits have sure jacked punk up; but, really, all those noisy and utterly crapalicious gangs of Exploited wannabes, poorly reincarnated Dead Boys and Black Flag fetishists have done their share to fuck stuff up, as well. You know who they are: the ones who haven’t learned that it’s not the fact that The Germs were sloppy and nihilistic, but that they were the first in line to be sloppy and nihilistic.

With punk’s artistic and ideological legitimacy eaten up by mall-punk poofs on one side and thuggish rebels without a clue on the other, the genre’s left without much room for bands to really get edgy without sounding like a bunch of undereducated yobs with a few Slaughter and the Dogs records. Wives somehow turn the trick on Erect the Youth Problem, nipping the aesthetic, if not the sound, of punk’s most visceral rockers from The Dead Boys and Black Flag to The Locust and Blood Brothers.

Punk rock wasn’t meant to be an easy listen, a plan Wives take thoroughly to heart on this album. As cranky as a hung-over meth head, Wives careen through an album that’s poised enough to pull off its apocalyptic dynamics and covered-in-grime sound. Sometimes Wives swing through atom-bomb blasts of guitar and drums that push VU meters dangerously into the red, then back off to an awkward, ambling bass line (“Wasted Again, Again”). Other times, the band races through bass lines and furious strumming that suggests everything from Hüsker Dü’s hardcore days or Government Issue (“Lunch Money”). Still at other times, the act pulls out all the stops and – amid lyrics that check dead babies and fucking your mother – sounds like an anonymous early ’80s L.A. hardcore band, hopped up on speed, practicing in a tin garbage can.

When Wives take on any of those sounds, however, it’s a good thing. Partially sustained by the band’s orgiastic love of noise, partially held together by the band’s absolute disdain for anything that could be considered remotely mainstream, Wives are everything out of bounds that punk celebrates – the exact opposite of blueprint-based teen-punk ragers. Noisy, brash and, in all honesty, too spastic for steady listening, Erect the Youth Problem shows that, despite the “punk’s not dead!” attitude, punk’s not dead.