The Foxtails – Love in the Face of Overwhelming Odds
Similar artists: blink-182, Paramore, The 1975
Genre: Pop Punk, Alternative Rock
You can only wear your leather jacket or smoke your unfiltered cigs for so long. Eventually, it’s summer, and wearing a leather jacket is not practical anymore; the smoke just makes you cough and smell. What’s there to do for an encore? We all wonder what James Dean would’ve done once, inevitably, he couldn’t be cast in movies or teenagers. Would he have become a Marlon Brando-type actor or just faded away?
Punk kids have the same questions to ask themselves. The answer is of particular importance: the kids find themselves in bands, writing songs about these changes and trying to communicate them to the world. What’s their message? Will they avoid growing up like some of the pop-punk groups currently touring the world, or tell it like it is?
Maybe it all has to begin with a bit of tenderness and honesty. The Foxtails’s “Love in the Face of Overwhelming Odds” is a pop-punk song empty of any silly posturing. This is a love song and one that analyzes the likelihood of success with considerable sang-froid. That’s impressive on its own, sure. But rest assured, the energy and melodies that are needed to make a pop-punk song great are also here.
GreenWing – At The Time
Similar artists: Weezer, Green Day, The Dirty Nil
Genre: Punk, Indie Rock, Alternative Rock
In most cities it’s getting harder for bars to get their liquor license. You can’t smoke in them anymore. And, even the pub grub, so beloved by overweight drinkers, is being cooked with calories in mind. People are getting healthier and that’s enough to give us hope. But it’s enough to also make us wonder how we’re gonna get our kicks.
Of course, the thing that typically goes on is that at the end of a small, healthy meal, you are allowed a much smaller dessert. You hope it’ll be chocolate covered in more chocolate, but it’s more likely to be a piece of fruit. That’ll surely help you feel healthier and live longer. However, rock music often adopts the same attitude. You have to run through an album for one track. You have to wait for a few years for your favourite band to make one album. And you have to listen to minutes and minutes before a track delivers the right chorus.
Oh, well. Not everyone, fortunately, is looking for the most sensible way of doing things. GreenWing’s “At The Time” like their music to be like an irresonsably sweet and fattening dessert. The hooks hit you from the get-go and don’t stop hitting you until the end. This is not a song meant to make you want to carve its lyrics into the back cover of your math book. This is music meant to make you want to jump up and down and find that bar that’s turned into a speakeasy and hasn’t enforced any of those fair but monstrous rules.
