I liked this Houston band enough to mail-order their 7”, which was cool pop punk far less boilerplate than their band name would imply. This album—apparently their first, last and only—is a bit harder to digest, though. It’s eleven uniformly mid-tempo ((“we promised we’d never play faster/one year later it’s a fucking disaster”)) poppish punkers with a vague ((though not unexpected)) ‘70s U.K. influence…sort of like if you took the Clash’s “Give ‘Em Enough Rope” LP, and subtracted everything from it that could possibly remind you of Rancid ((which would be just about everything)), then used that as a framework off of a which a band that melds the angstiness of the Connie Dungs re-directed towards youth politics with the occasionally ho-hum pop-punk chug of, say, Parade ((or am i thinking of Pariah? Well, some band that starts with “PAR” and isn’t the Parasites)) can cobble together their intended swan song magnum opus ((although the only Clash album referenced in the lyrics is the first one, so go figure)), i think. Not a terrible plan, really ((if you understood any of that)); my main complaint is that some of these songs just seem awkwardly constructed, following sometimes bizarrely-accentuated lyrics of a decidedly atypical narrative bent. I mean, not like i was there peering over their shoulders when they wrote this album, but it really seems to me that their lyrics guy just wrote a bunch of stuff out on notebook paper, then tried to write music that would follow along to the lyrics, as opposed to the more conventional approach of writing music and then putting words to it. Not that i’m any kind of produce manager of note, but that’s rarely a good way to run a supermarket. Still, overall a pretty interesting listen, though i sort of wish the band would have called themselves “There Goes Norman” instead. BEST SONG: “Our Last Song” BEST SONG TITLE: “I ((heart)) Lora Logic” FANTASTIC AMAZING TRIVIA FACT: Ray Luhan was in Parade, Pariah, AND the Parasites. See? I TOLD you it was fantastic and amazing.
–norb (Team Science)