For the Record: Surfing Strange

To anyone who has felt the slightest angst throughout his or her formative years — and I know this applies to all of you — great news: pop punk lives on! But I’m not talking Vans Warped Tour here; I’m talking the hard stuff. The good stuff. The ol’ fashioned, ass-kicking tempos venting those oh-so-important frustrations of the suburban teenage experience packed into neat little singles and half-hour LPs. And we largely have the Crutchfield twins – Katie of Waxahatchee and Allison of Swearin’ – to thank for that. The latter enjoyed the summer festival circuit on the backbone of her excellent spring release “Cerulean Salt” while Allison’s band recently put out “Surfing Strange”, their second LP.

The album kicks off with “Dust in the Gold Sack”, which is quite possibly the best pop punk song in the past 10 years, if not for “Kenosha” from their first LP. Ripe with heavy licks and thick riffs, Swearin’ flaunts its early influences, some of whom are titans of the genre – you can find bits and pieces of the Replacements, the Breeders, the Pixies and countless others on the opener and scattered throughout the eleven tracks as well. “Mermaid” is merely a darkened “Only in Dreams” from the Weezer’s “Blue Album”, while “Echo Locate” is a cross between Nirvana’s “In Bloom” and “Insomniac”-era Green Day (which was damn good — don’t let anyone tell you otherwise).

Despite the negatives attached to the genre’s name, on top of the risks of sounding anything remotely like those last two bands mentioned, Swearin’ effortlessly forsakes the clean tunings of the last 15 years of mass-produced consumer-pandering pop punk. The use of gritty distortion gives rise to an extra dimension to their music that the precision of more recent overproduction eliminates; no longer do they need to lay down an additional layer in order to make up for flatness as these tightly coiled songs are highly textured  despite the simplicity of arrangements.

In comparison to the band’s self-titled debut, the album’s cuts are a tad slower and more drawn out, which isn’t exactly hard to do when its longest track barely reached 2:38. The transition mirrors the new mood of the record; the irritation tinging Allison’s sharp remarks in the first LP gives way to a darker, more despondent undertone in “Surfing Strange”.  The intermittent youthful joy found in the former, best encapsulated by her falling for the sticky skin of a Southern boy in the song “Just”, is replaced with anxiety and frustration, sometimes to a daunting degree.

Lyrically, her rhymes carry slightly less heft than the poetry of twin Katie’s outlet. But such an earnest and straightforward delivery is refreshing in itself. Her words need not be drenched in hazy metaphor; rather, she evokes a visceral response from a more pure, stripped expression. And why not? Such naturalness is what fostered the massive appeal to pop punk in the first place. Its function is to bridge the gap between the isolating abrasiveness of 70s punk and the broad, collectively tame youth experience. In all, they nail it on this record.

As sweet as it is mesmerizing, Allison’s voice humanizes the dark overtones of her palpable melodies. They stand in gloomy contrast to Kyle Gilbride’s not-too-nasally whine, which is a nice change of pace from the Allison show in their debut. The band incorporates a stringent “you write it, you sing it” policy and it pays out nicely in the four tracks he leads.

Like most albums, “Surfing Strange” does falter at a couple points. “Glare of the Sun” is a bit of a misstep, and, save a brief reprieve with “Unwanted Place”, the latter half of the album falls into a lull. Considering the form of a pop punk album, it’s a bit problematic to find oneself a little bored before the 34th and final minute of “Surfing Strange” passes. Yet it never devolves into cacophony, and even the more boring tracks on the record are pleasant on their own regard.

With this solid thrill of a release, Swearin’ excites me for the future of rock. Not that I was ever really worried; the album, at its very core, is still but a re-imagination of past formulas still as fresh as ever. But any world in which I can admit to liking pop punk again — better yet, any world in which pop-punk is good again — is better than the last. Thanks to Swearin’, things just might be looking up.