Plow United’s Marching Band is one of my favorite records of the last few years. It’s exuberant, smart, hopeful, sarcastic, and catchy as living shit and they make that shit look ridiculously easy and, yeah, you should consider getting it if you don’t already. Goodnight Sellout!, their sophomore record from 1996, has gotten the reissue treatment from Dead Broke. 1996 was a crazy time for punk in general and pop punk specifically, and this LP was, according to the band, written as a way to distinctly try something new. To step out of the confines of the pop punk genre. Test themselves. It’s a frantic, almost hardcore-sounding record at times, with a lot of textures and varying parts. There are a lot of chances being taken here and, no, they don’t always succeed. Mostly, I feel like it’s a collection of songs that are slippery, disjointed, and hard to get a handle on. (Hell, that may have even been intentional.) As a document of an era and product of a particular scene, it’s probably a pretty integral record to folks who were there. But as someone who’s hearing Goodnight Sellout! for the first time, without that historical context, I can’t help but feel that the band’s continuing to get better and better, that their best work may be before them, and that I can’t wait to hear what they do next.
–keith (Dead Broke)