Halfway Down – No Time Now
If they stick together for a long time, pop-punk bands spend the first years of their career writing songs about being carefree and reckless and then spend all of the rest of their career writing songs about how they feel sorry for themselves and long for their glory days. Some of them develop a sense of humour about it all. Others, like Sum 41, catch themselves doing it long enough that they feel they need to call it quits.
But like Halfway Down, a pop-punk band from the U.S.A., has realized responsibility and worries come to us all regardless of how much we had in high school or what kind of music we enjoyed. To turn your back on these things doesn’t work. Just look at the former punk kids, now adults, drinking themselves to death. Nah, the best thing is to face the music and keep a sense of humour about it all.
Halfway Down’s “No Time Now,” should you not speak English, will sound exactly like the kind of jovial, energy-filled pop-punk song that you’d expect from this kind of music genre. But the lyrics talk of the struggle with the day-to-day grind. It talks about how hard it is to move from the world of adolescent dreams to the responsibilities of adulthood. But Halfway Down sees the comedy in all of this, and this song also serves as a promise not to back down now.
Jersey Calling – Projections
Punk music has been played in many different ways. Music fans will know that there have been numerous subgenres that, at one point or another, were of notoriety. But besides having a “punk attitude” get name-checked in every documentary about anyone deserving of this, there are only two types of punk music worth making nowadays – punk music about real things and about fantasy topics.
Which of the two flavours that you choose will say plenty about what you’re looking to get out of life? Will it be the music that lacks finesse but delivers the news from the kind of neighbourhoods or parts of the world where you dare not tread? Or, will it be the music whose lyrics talk about dating supermodels or bankers and being admired while doing pranks at the mall late into your 50s?
Jersey Calling’s “Projections” may be a tune about illusions and false pretences, but the band is going for an earnest, working-class punk sound that almost all modern fans of music will recognise. This is punk music for people who know all about small towns, hard work and the excitement of watching a rock band giving it their own on a Saturday night. With its back-and-forth duelling male and female vocals and its brand of Springsteenesque-punk, Jersey Calling provide all that you could want on a Saturday night.
