Man, I should really like this. It’s got all the road markers in punk that I’m a sucker for: multiple vocals, raspy singing, melodic guitars, and someone mentioning that they sound kinda like Kid Dynamite. But something’s missing. It’s like a model airplane with one sheet of parts not being in the box. All the parts, apart, look fine, “Oh, shit, this is gonna be rad,” but, in the end, with some pieces AWOL, it doesn’t fly. Each of these four songs has parts that I dig, but the song parts seem sloppily glued together. They don’t quite match up (and a consistently faster tempo wouldn’t hurt the proceedings one bit). The B-side’s opener, “Washington St.” is the breaker. I’m almost to the point in my life where I’m willing to give slack to bands that really like Bruce Springsteen and cite him as an unapologetic influence—if and only if they shake up the Boss’s jar of fireflies while heckling the E-Street band. You know, a quick flurry of kicks to the nads and some abuse to the dude with the scarf on his head. But punk bands that remind me of Bruce Springsteen almost immediately and foremost, that teetered this release into the “nice try, but no” category.
–todd (1-2-3-4 Go!)