Personal & The Pizzas: Raw Pie LP
— Price: 159 SEK

Take the classic sounds of two old school New York punk bands (the Ramones and the Dictators) and a dose of the Stooges, mix in some odd references to pizza and liberal amounts of serious thug rock, and you get the oddly classic sounds of Hoboken, New Jersey’s Personal and the Pizzas and their album Raw Pie.

It’s the sort of sound that would be really hard to make up if you hadn’t heard it first. Personal and the Pizzas crank through sounds that seem to come from an alternate universe in the good old days, creating songs like "Pepperoni Eyes," an upbeat love song about a girl with well, yeah, pepperoni eyes.

The pizza references don’t end there. With "I Don’t Wanna Be No Personal Pizza," "Pizza Army" and "Toss That Pie," they hammer through so many pizza references backed by sloppy fast, fun punk rock that you have to wonder if their act and persona weren’t born by a bunch of guys in the kitchen of a pizzeria, slinging pies late at night.

It’s not all about pizza, though, although it all is pretty street level. "Brass Knuckles" is a lo-fi bit of greaser-influenced goodness, "I Don’t Feel So Happy Now No More," "Tear Jerker" and "Nobody Makes My Girl Cry But Me" seem to flirt with a bit of psychedelic sound and twang without letting go to tremendous amounts of homage to Ramones, and "Never Find Me" just slaps you all over the place with more liberally manhandled Ramones-influenced guitars.

Throughout the course of the 13 tracks, you start out wanting to shrug it all off as a joke, only to find yourself rapidly becoming a believer in what this bad does. They take great punk rock with sometimes silly but always catchy lyrics and play it like the great bands before them have done – they seem to take themselves just seriously enough that it’s good, but not so seriously that it becomes sad slop. Honestly, if you dig classic punk, you'll find yourself enjoying Personal as well.

And while some of their lyrics may sound a little stupid, when you think about it, the Ramones were not lyrical masters of any sort - their sloppy punk with liberal allusions to ‘50s and ‘60s rock and bubblegum groups were what carried them. This is pretty similar – some of their songs would be absolutely ridiculous if they weren’t delivered with such serious thuggish conviction. At the end of Raw Pie, it’s readily apparent that Personal and the Pizzas are too good at what they do to not be taken seriously.

(bachelor/red lounge)