As the years pass and the things that used to be new to me don’t catch me by surprise so easily, I find myself asking for more. I’m not so jaded that I need a band to have everything, and I don’t have a checklist or anything, but it takes a lot more for a band to get me psyched up than it did when I was fifteen. This record has me really psyched up. It’s pop punk. It does everything that pop punk is supposed to do. But this record also does more than that. It tells stories. The lyrics aren’t just throwaways. “Crutches,” the title track, addresses that moment when a person realizes that old behaviors may not be the best behaviors, particularly when they’re damaging. It’s not about moving past them. It’s not about succumbing to them. It’s just about that moment of realization. To lyrically catch and explore a moment like that… and to have the music match? That’s more than what I ask for from my punk rock. Maybe it’s what I should ask for from now on? How many bands can deliver that, though?
–mp (Red Scare/It’s Alive)