Seems fitting to start with a recent Total Punk review (I write these to get 'em in the general playbox at the college radio station):
The Circulators - Insufficient Fun
In the liner notes of a reissue of The Real Kids’ debut LP, the author reflects that “life then was–still is–a kinda aimless search for a thrill, and that thrill was, goofy as it sounds, rock n’ roll.” Indeed: boredom, apathy, tedium and ennui are universal problems, and rock ‘n’ roll offers a universal solution, alchemizing listlessness into restlessness into cheap guitars on Facebook Marketplace into raucous bursts of blood-pumping ruckus that, for a couple minutes at a time, allow us to lose ourselves in our own animal exuberance and forget that we’ve ever felt dead inside. In this sense, the title of San Francisco-based The Circulators’ debut LP poses the fundamental problem–“Insufficient Fun”--and the tracks themselves present the fuck-it-let’s-just-roll-a-ball-of-flames-down-a-hill solution. “Come on baby, let’s go on the loose,” the first track commands, and the wide-open, way-out rumpus doesn’t stop until the album suddenly ends 30-ish minutes later. “I wanna see you every day, I’m hung on every word you say!” the vocalist cries to his paramour on “Wired Over You”; it’s not entirely clear whether this is the same lover who ends up in jail for stealing catalytic converters on the second track (“Catalytic Converter”), but I like to think that it is. If boredom is a dreary descent down the slope towards the x/death-axis, and thrills are the opposite of boredom, then according to my calculations, the most life-affirming cris de coeur are the ones that maximize recklessness, mixing excitement and danger and fun in a bottle and shaking it up to spark a chemical reaction that intensifies the effects of all three ingredients. I mean, yeah, sure, you might end up in jail. And jail definitely sucks and is boring. But that’s OK, because when you finally get released, we’ve got a solution for that.
