After throwing mattresses out of windows, dancing naked on stage during a Green Day encore and getting kicked out of many a hotel, New York punk-pranksters D Generation are back from seemingly endless touring for the release of their latest effort, Through the Darkness.

Following up their acclaimed debut No Lunch was no small feat, and the guys were ready to mix up their sound a bit while writing songs on the road. "We always wanna be changing and going in different directions, but keep the original spark," says frontman Jesse Malin. "We tried to make the experimental, noisier stuff more out there and the pop stuff more pop, like, kind of go to extremes."

And extreme it is. Through the Darkness, produced by Tony Visconti of T -Rex and David Bowie fame, is a full-on sonic salad of varying textures, with consummate D Gen in-your-face rawness layered with mellow melodies. Tying it all together is Malin's Social Distortion-worthy rasping about the issues closing in on punk-rockers everywhere.

"We've gotten to the place where it's a little more concise and more to the point and we're able to say it in less time," Malin explains. "The topics just always being stuff that's important to us and things we feel and see everyday and hopefully someone somewhere, beyond our backyard, can relate to a lot of it."

Being out of his own backyard of New York's East Village gave Malin an interesting perspective from which to write. "A lot of it was written on the road, in London or in a hotel and in places and countries that I had never been before," he says. "You get to look at things as an outsider, looking back at America, looking into these countries as an American travelling, and that influences a lot of the isolation, which is the feeling of some of those songs."

But don't believe that D Generation have morphed into soft and contemplative rockers. Their constant touring included, in the true D Gen spirit, many acts of debauchery, with nudity a strong theme. "If you get bored you come up with things," Malin says. "We took all the lamp shades off all these different size lamps in Missouri and put them on and danced through the halls naked knocking on people's doors and showing them our penises."

Malin will soon exhibit another fine asset, as he did some punk crossover work playing a drummer in Martin Scorsese's Bring out the Dead, which hits theaters this fall. "Scorsese is one of the most intense great creative forces in the twentieth century," Malin says. "And it was an honor to work with him." So, was Malin able to put his punk ethics aside and take direction from the film icon? "Oh yeah! The two days we spent on the set, thirteen-hour days, I had my own little spot in the trailer and it was very neat." Neat? "I just talked to him about music and it was just one of the greatest experiences ever."

Another D Gen hero is Neil Young, and the punks pay tribute on Through the Darkness with a cover of "Don't Be Denied" from Young's dark 1973 album Time Fades Away. "We got to meet him over a year ago," says Malin. "Definitely a big part of making records is getting to meet people you admire or influenced you, and sometimes they even know your band. It's just a great feeling and one of the real rewards of doing this."

LIZA GHORBANI
(March 5, 1999)