The Lawrence Arms’ ‘Oh! Calcutta!’ arrived into my life in a crumpled brown envelope, smeared with Sharpie. Nineteen year old me had somehow ended up on the UK promo list for Fat Wreck Chords, and this meant physical CDs arriving at my university halls with a regularity that alarmed neighbours. I thought I knew The Lawrence Arms before I heard this album. Everyone did. They were pleasant enough punk from Chicago, peddling ‘Cocktails and Dreams’ with a side of emotional honest lyrics. Two years before ‘Oh! Calcutta!’, they’d begun to bare their teeth though, getting kicked off the 2004 Warped Tour after a week for loudly pointing out the anti-DIY ethos of the event. Their carefully unfolding career trajectory which had reached a high in 2003’s ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’ had taken a swerve too as Brendan Kelly (bass/vocals) and drummer Neil Hennessy had joined up with Alkaline Trio and Rise Against to form gorgeously shouty hardcore-lite The Falcon. Looking back, this side project was a harbinger of the fast, uncompromising direction that The Lawrence Arms were preparing to take on ‘Oh! Calcutta!’, a record which felt like it came smack out of nowhere to completely reform how we saw the band.

History proved The Lawrence Arms right to take their new direction. Punknews rated ‘Oh! Calcutta!’ as their top album of the entire decade, ranking it higher than Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’ or Blink 182’s ‘Take off Your Pants And Jacket’. Unlike Billie Joe Armstrong’s diatribe (despite his recent lyrical updates), ‘Oh! Calcutta!’ hasn’t aged a day since it was released. Opening with a blunt bass and the challenging, sarcastic “shall we dance?”, ‘The Devil’s Takin’ Names’ feels so fresh and modern, with moments of dropping down to near silence like a clenched jaw explode into fierce rejection of anything placed in their way. This opening track was the first time we’d ever heard The Lawrence Arms using two vocalists simultaneously, and the sheer “wow” moment is rarely equalled. It’s like a cinder block to the head, even now, to hear the two voices never quite harmonising and always weaving in and out of connection.

‘Oh! Calcutta!’ set out its agenda from the get go; life is absurd and intellectualism is whatever you want to define it as. The back cover quotes Shakespeare and Bill and Ted, and the song titles reference Judy Bloom, Charles Darwin, Happy Days and their continuing issues with the Warped Tour (plus a lyrical jab at Davey Havok). Everything was equal in its relevance to The Lawrence Arms, whether it’s high culture or pop culture. That’s what makes it such an iconoclastic record, the very definition of punk rock in the twenty first century, and also a record which lasts. We’re in the era of post-truth and deep-fakes now, where being nice to your neighbours or suggesting children should have lunch are controversial takes. ‘Oh! Calcutta!’ called all this twenty years ago and reminded us that we get to choose what’s important to each of us.

The way The Lawrence Arms captured universal sentiment is what makes ‘Oh! Calcutta!’ so great. “I’m like a record player, I keep going round with the needle in my arm making someone else’s sound,” they sing on ‘Like A Record Player’, a song of longing for escape from the traps we find ourselves in over and over again. ‘Beyond The Embarassing Style’ distills the hope that someone who’s wronged you eventually faces karmic retribution, soundtracked by tense bass and a scream for justice. It’s a coming of age album in the sense that it’s a record for people who’ve made it to adulthood and realised that it’s really not all it’s cracked up to be. Any bitterness is burned off by wit and humour though; when you realise they really are singing “aeroplane, aeroplane” on ‘Are You There Margaret? It’s Me, God” forces a smile to even the most jaded face. It’s the same tactic that Heart Attack Man use now, only The Lawrence Arms were doing it two decades ago.

I carefully decanted my copy of ‘Oh! Calcutta!’ into a plastic sleeve on the day it arrived at my halls. My caution was futile as I ended up playing it everywhere I could until the disc was so scratched it was barely readable. A problem like needing to breath on your CD and polish it with the sleeve of your hoody to try and get it to stop skipping has long passed from our lives, but the absolute joy of feeling that The Lawrence Arms really get what we’re all thinking can’t fade. ‘Oh! Calcutta!’ has become an album that’s grown as we have, and each listen reveals a little something you missed the last million you heard it. It’s a hell of a twenty-first century punk record and should never be underestimated or forgotten.

KATE ALLVEY