Photoshop is a beautiful thing for those willing to spend the time to work with it. It’s a tool of the devil in lazy hands though. The cover art isn’t offensive but it is boring and it could have been done better with a little effort. Jeez, sorry about that. Anyway Automatic 7 are from Southern California and I could have told you that with out looking at their address. There’s something in the DNA of the band and the echo of Mike Ness in the singer that invisibly telegraph it. It’s not bad by any stretch and these guys don’t rely as heavily as a lot of their neighbors tend to on old Social Distortion clichés. They switch up the tempos and go places Social D don’t venture. I can appreciate this. Hell, they even go so far as to lift a riff from Wilco’s “Shouldn’t Be Ashamed” on “Greasy (Revisited)”.
–Steve Stephenson (Mental)