Music Video: Sucker - Remain Pain

Back in what seems to be a former life, I was a serious Rude Boy.  Sure, not in the traditional Jamaican sense of the term.  But I was a suburban white Rude Boy.  If it was ska, or even ska-like, I would buy it.  If there was a ska band in town - even if they weren't very good - I had to drop everything and go to the show.  I have fallen out of love with the genre over the years though for a number of reasons.  Primarily I fell out of love with ska mainly because most bands just followed the musical formula by rote, without ever really doing anything new or interesting with it.  As long as there was a bouncy beat, songcraft became almost irrelevant.

For better or for worse, ska has spread around the world, and along with it it's offshoot "skacore".  This is probably my least favorite sub-genre of ska because the less talented practitioners simply write a hardcore punk tune, and then half way through, they patch in a ska tune.  Very seldom do the two mesh together with any kind of sensible cohesion.  Today, Open World Music brings you a skacore band from Xi'an China that almost gets it right.  As demonstrated by their song Remain Pain, they have the energy, they have the attitude, and they almost manage to write a catchy tune.  Almost.

I really shouldn't be too hard on Sucker.  My attitude toward them is largely colored by my previous biases against skacore.  Within the severe limitations of the genre, I actually think they are pretty decent.  And bonus points go to them for singing in Chinese.  But I hope for their sake that they move beyond the restrictive confines of skacore.  There's so much more out there!