New Found Glory - Hits

Mon 26th May, 2008 in Music Reviews

First let me say before I kick off that I’m probably not of the target audience for this sort of material. My idea of punk is The Sex Pistols, The Damned, Iggy and the Stooges and to a lesser extent Dead Kennedys and Black Flag. Bands like Rancid weren’t too bad, but acts like Blink 182 and Good Charlotte finally pogo-ed the skull of real punk into the moshpit floor. I stopped listening to anything that sat in the music shop under the “punk/hardcore” sign a long time ago. This is POP punk, with warranted capitals on the pop.

Now on to the music. As a greatest hits album, you tend to expect the big songs, and this delivers all the band’s best known music and also includes a couple of rare and previously unavailable songs in the form of Constant Static and Situations.

Kicking off with the previously mentioned Situations, which really should have been left as a download only, it rolls on through the band’s back catalogue, chronologically featuring songs from all four albums that the record company have the rights to (their debut is off-limits according to my info). You can hear why: over an 11-year career, they haven’t come close to having a certified hit. It’s not that the charts these days aren’t full of equally derivative dribble (if not worse). The songs grind on and on with equal parts dull riffing, whining vocals and soft/loud/soft repetition.

I could rattle through the song names, listing off the pros and cons of each song, discuss the lyrical and musical content (or lack thereof), placing it in the context of the evolution of the band. As there has been precious little of that, though, I won’t bother pulling out my thesaurus to come up with 20 synonyms for “catchy” and “up-beat”. While my foot was tapping throughout listening, I think that had more to do with the four coffees I had than the music, which continues from song to song with the same regurgitated formula.

The press release that accompanied the CD referred to these guys as “inspiring” the current generation of premier artists in this genre. Unfortunately I’m not sure that’s something to be all that proud of.