Maniacal Laughter: 23 Minutes, Nothing Wasted — 9/10

Twelve songs, 23 minutes, with nothing left out of place. That’s the whole idea behind Maniacal Laughter, the 1995 album from The Bouncing Souls, and it holds up completely. This is a record made before the band’s sound took on any studio polish, when the goal was simple: get in, make noise, get out. It does exactly that.

Track by Track

The album opens with “Lamar Vannoy,” the longest song here at 3:04, and it sets the terms right away — fast, shouted, no wasted motion. “No Rules” follows at barely over a minute, a statement of intent as much as a song.

“The Freaks, Nerds and Romantics” and “Argyle” carry the middle of the record. Argyle in particular has held on with listeners for its hook, the kind that still gets named years later when people talk about the band’s early work.

“All of This and Nothing” ends after 55 seconds, closer to a cry than a full song, and “The Bmx Song” picks up right behind it with 1:57 of the same driving pace — it’s one of the tracks named among the record’s standouts by writers who follow the band.

“Quick Chek Girl” is the standout here. At 2:52 it runs longer than most of the record, and it earns every second.

“Headlights… Ditch!” is the shortest track on the album at 44 seconds, a fragment, gone before you can settle into it. “Here We Go” follows and does the opposite — it’s one of the songs most often named when people talk about this record, a tight 1:58.

“Born to Lose” is another of the album’s most noted songs, 2:07 built on the same fast, direct approach that carries the whole record. “Moon Over Asbury” eases back slightly at 1:46. The album closes with “The Ballad of Johnny X,” 2:07 that ends things without any ceremony.

Six of these tracks have been singled out by name in writing about the band over the years. In the order they appear on the album:

1. Lamar Vannoy
2. Argyle
3. The Bmx Song
4. Quick Chek Girl
5. Here We Go
6. Born to Lose

That is half the album’s twelve songs getting individual mention from the people who write about this kind of music.

How the Record Is Judged

Maniacal Laughter is remembered mainly through listeners and writers who follow punk music closely, rather than through wide, general notice. One punk review journal wrote about the album when it first came out, saying it was fast and harsh in its playing, which the writer said had come to be expected from a young punk band. A separate line from that same journal, closer in tone to a personal aside, put the album among the writer’s most liked work by the band. A later piece from the same journal, written roughly six years after the album came out, called it “their best album, Maniacal Laughter, is nearly six years old.”

No settled score exists for this record. There is no combined figure from many writers to set against any single judgment.

The two main pieces of writing from that journal were doing different jobs, at different points in time.

The two lines are not opposed to one another. One is sizing up the playing; the other is sizing up the standing the record built over time. Both point the same direction.

Nothing on this record stays around longer than it needs to.

The Verdict

There is no wide, settled score to measure this album against. None exists.

The 9 out of 10 below is this paper’s own stated position, offered plainly, without pretending it settles a question that writers outside the punk audience never really took up. The first judgment of the record, that it was fast and harsh in its playing and already expected from a young punk band, was written close to the time it came out. Roughly six years later, the same journal called it the band’s best work.

Twelve songs, 23 minutes, six of them still getting named individually years after the fact — that’s not a young band simply meeting expectations. That’s a band doing exactly what it set out to do, in exactly the time it needed to do it.

This is one of our most admired works of its kind, plainly stated. It does not ask for more than 23 minutes, and it does not waste one of them.

90s music · album review · Bouncing Souls · pop punk · punk rock