When I was 13 I used to watch this Punk-O-Rama DVD all the time: Playstation 2 > 12’’ Magnavox television > impressionable and confused tweenage brain—this was the signal pattern over which the same 22 music videos for songs by various artists on Epitaph Records would travel, almost daily, for a major chunk of 2003. Now it’s 2015 and I am 25, and while they’re all permanently burned into the aging last stage of that electronic path to some degree or another, I can tell you with absolute certainty that no video from that long-lost plastic plate is remembered with more fondness or in more detail than the one for Refused’s “New Noise” off The Shape Of Punk To Come.

I know I’m not the only dingus to have had his dim bulb brightened by a nugget of experimentalism or genre-bending within the confines of punk rock at one time or another, but I point to my initial exposure to this song as an early peak on the topographical plane of my musical and cultural development as a human—one of the earliest remember-able experiences of that “what the fuck is this?” feeling, the one that washes over you in a momentary combo of fear, confusion, and excitement, causing your horizons to subsequently (if only momentarily) widen.

Listening to Multiple Vices, a short EP birthed unto the world this past December by Worcester punk-band-fuck-it-jazz-ensemble TREMARCHE, harkens back to those formative moments. The old ones where you felt like you were hearing something new by hanging your ear over the edge of the known world, even if you weren’t actually.

Composed of longtime frenemies and denizens of the Worcester house-show scene Charles, Josh, Olivia, and Anthony, Tremarche deliver a blistering, spastic, noisy charge of scrappy and jazzy punk filthy enough for the shittiest of basements yet thought-about enough for the khakiest of the pleated-pants crowd. Listen to the ways the two completely contradictory guitar sounds on this EP (one a heavy and familiar hardcore tone, the other a metallic kerrang of near-un-understandable chords and weird melody-things) just work with each other in a way they never would separately, and you won’t be hard-pressed to find parallels in the theory-ruining improvisational rages of Coltrane or Ellington.

The compositions themselves show a similar lack of regard for established notions of punk structure and dynamics too, winding instead down angular, non-repetitive paths to completion, whatever that is. Verses and choruses are replaced by what feel more like movements and moments simply incidental in nature, stumbled upon during hours of improvisation, experimentation, and just fucking going for it. Then chained together and given a title. Take for example the track “Google Shape,” which meanders through a blasting bass-and-drum intro and across a frantic sweep of punk noise to a crooked breakdown that feels like normal ol’ hardcore where everyone gets to scream, except all the chords are downright wrong, before finally landing in the skronk dumpster next to some Zorn LPs that got left in the microwave too long. This jog clocks in at 1:28.

Now, none of this malarky is unheard of. Tremarche aren’t reinventing rock music or blowing anyone’s mind out of their ass in a way that hasn’t or isn’t being done at this very moment by countless other great envelope-pushing bands (in New England and beyond). But what truly does set Multiple Vices apart (and which saves it from the common pitfalls of similarly voiced artifacts of the “experimental” or “noise-rock” canons) is the inescapable sense of humility and punk abandon that permeates this entire EP. It’s short and sweet and keeps its sense of humor. Even the aforementioned “Google Shape,” for all its dexterity and raw anger, ends in a perfunctory “goodnight.”

Too punk to be noise, too weird to be hardcore, these are songs about trying and giving up and fucking off, and at the end of the day the EP they compose is but a short exercise in putting aside expectations or conventions or even aspirations in order to just do something you love and leave it alone. It reminds us of the pure fun that punk rock, and indeed music in general, is supposed to be. Taking us back through a fleeting, so-small-it’s-barely-visible tunnel to those faraway teenage moments when we felt like anything was possible. Where we couldn’t give the slightest shit what anyone thought and just believed in ourselves and our music and our friends.

That’s what it reminds me of, anyway. And honestly, in the topographical valley of a 25-year-old reality, it’s nice to be reminded that, at least at one point in time, listening to some weird punk band from Sweden (or Worcester) could totally overwhelm your body and brain to the point where you just had to ask whoever was playing it, through their TV or car stereo or computer or whatever, “What the fuck is this?”

P.S. Tremarche is on indefinite hiatus (Fugazi style). They are, however, something of a retroactive supergroup. Please check out the currently active excellent bands all members have moved on to and go to their shows in Worcester, Boston, and elsewhere:

Uh-Huh — (Charles & Josh)
OJ — (Olivia)
Kiss Concert/DOT GOV/Linda — (Anthony)