1 out of 5

Label: Essay Records

Producer: mostly Mike Dixon

Sloppy, throaty punk rock, sorta rude and crude, sorta just havin’ fun, throwin’ down quick riffs and minute long songs where the words don’t matter beyond  singable chorus.  There are a few notable tracks on here that indicate why I tracked this down (based on a single from an Indiana indie music compilation), where the scuzz and fuzz relents for intense and catchy choruses before slamming back into head-bobbing jams, but on the whole these 32 tracks lean toward rock revivalism.  It’s a bar band.  It’s a local band that whips up a frenzy.  It’s a band with songtitles like ‘The Guys At Autozone Were Assholes,’ and frankly, it’s not all that horrible.  Once I got over the disappointment of how normal this disc was, it has the ability to get my toe tapping.  But this is undoubtedly a live act.  I end up docking it a star (down from two) because it just annoys me for some reason, the casual drug refrences and the White Stripes-y kick’ out the old school jams b.s. of it.

It’s clearly recorded, consistent, and each song is over quickly before barreling into the next (sometimes not even stopping to actually make a transition).  This sits proudly on someone’s shelf, but I’d question how often they listen to it as opposed to the 90 million other punk pop rock bands that manage to string together several successfully catchy tracks instead of just a scattered few.