What I’m Listening To: Rejects United, Boyhood Survival Kit

• Artist website: www.rejectsunited.com
• Listen at: www.myspace.com/rejectsunited
• Available on: Amazon MP3, eMusic

Rejects United are a four-piece band from Portugal (who knew?) that play punk-influenced rock of the louder-faster-harder variety. Boyhood Survival Kit is their first album and it is equal parts classic rock and old school punk. The album is ambitious, invoking 30 years of music history over 14 tracks as well as mixing in modern styles.

Considering the range of influences on Boyhood Survival Kit, it’s a surprisingly cohesive album. It has the intensity of an old-fashioned punk album, but is moderated with a strong melodic sensibility. The result is a high-energy, complex sound that doesn’t sacrifice big, sing-along melodies. The vocals take center-stage for most of the album and are delivered with deceptive precision. The melodies are simple enough to allow for fairly direct vocals that emphasize intensity over technique on most the songs, but when the band slows down a bit the vocals show remarkable range. The lyrics occasionally stray into theatricality (”Mr. Adams Love Proposal”), but the most over the top songs have an ironic tone that undercuts the overblown metaphors. The instrumental work is solid and tightly delivered, straying into remarkable on several songs (”Learning Through Mutilation”). I’m the wrong person to go to for percussion or guitar critiques, but beyond being awesome, some of this stuff sounds pretty hard to deliver.

Standout tracks are “Dead In The Head,” “Learning Through Mutilation” and “Compulsive Denier.”

What You’re Listening To: May 11 - 17, 2008

This week’s most viewed albums are:

• Spiraling, Time Travel Made Easy (Now with a blog. Check them out.)
• Lorene Drive, Out Alive
• Forcefield ON, Llipspill

What I’m Listening To: The Panic Division, Songs From The Glasshouse

• Artist website: www.thepanicdivision.com
• Listen at: www.myspace.com/thepanicdivision
• Available on: Amazon MP3, eMusic

The Panic Division is a four piece band out of San Antonio. Songs From The Glasshouse is their second album, and it caught my attention because at first glance I thought it might be a live album recorded at The Glass House in Pomona. Which is why you shouldn’t buy things based on their titles. Someday I’m going to learn that.

Songs From The Glasshouseis a lush, synthtastic composition that is equal parts 80s pop revival and old-fashioned guitar rock. The lyrics and electronic elements draw heavily on the most cringe-worthy parts of 80s pop, which sounds like a bad thing. But The Panic Division has somehow managed to draw out the pieces of that sound and combine them with truly stellar guitar rock to create a sound that is neither retro nor really modern. Everything about this album is big. The sound is complex, the lyrics deal in metaphors of epic scale, and the vocals are delivered with so much conviction that it’s easy to overlook just how potentially awful the lyrics are. It requires a special kind of singer to take a lyric as cheesetasic as “take these broken wings and learn to fly again, learn to live so free” (”Broken Wings”) and deliver it in such a way that you can sing along and not feel like a complete tool.

Standout tracks are “Big Day,” “The Pieces That Mattered” and “Broken Wings”

What I’m Listening To: The Casual Lean, Swears

• Listen at: www.myspace.com/thecasuallean
• Available on: Amazon MP3, eMusic

Swears is the first album from Massachusettes five-piece band The Casual Lean, and it’s a raucous, swaggering piece of work. The album has the same ironic tone as Ghosts from The Gay Blades, but rather than TGB’s almost acoustic feel, The Casual Lean’s sound is complex and almost lush at times.

Swears opens with “The Bride,” a song that invokes every indie-rock tradition in the book and still manages to be awesomely original. The Casual Lean’s strongest asset is their storytelling ability, and even on songs where they may not be telling their own stories they deliver enough intensity that Swears feels personal. The lyrics are delivered with conviction and range, stacatto bursts on “The Bride” and a melodic croon on “The Deer.” Swears meanders a bit as the band plays with different styles and sounds, but is a remarkably cohesive piece. Lyrics and music both are delivered with enough conviction and pure ability to carry the core of the sound through the band’s experiments.

Standout tracks are “Third Degree Burns,” “The Blackout” and “The Deer.”

What I’m Listening To: Toby The Fugitive, Proxima Distort

• Listen at: www.myspace.com/tobythefugitive
• Available on: Amazon MP3, eMusic

Toby The Fugitive is a four piece band out of Clarksville, Tennessee that has neither a Toby nor a fugitive, but does have a whole lot of awesome. Although the band draws heavily on pop-punk tropes, the end product is a highly stylized rock album that has been stripped of most of the overwhelming sentimentality that has defined pop-punk lately.

On first listen, it would be easy to ignore the truly outstanding musical work and focus almost entirely on Casey Carstens’ vocals. The opening track, “Lab Rat,” is delivered with so much intensity the lyrics are almost incomprehensible. On the rest of the album Carstens dials it back a bit, but even on Proxima Distort’s slowest song (”Demi Moore”) the vocals emphasize style and intensity over melodic conventions. The album is split by the title track, “Proxima Distort,” an instrumental piece a bit too long and way too aggressive to be a called an interlude. The song gives the rest of the band a chance to take over for a bit and show off. I’m the wrong person to really analyze guitar and percussion work, but the sound is definitely bigger than a band this size has any right to. Despite the album’s stripped down feel, the arrangements are quite complex.

Standout tracks are “Burning Bridges,” “Description Of Sadness” and “Demi Moore.”