Blimey.
There aren’t too many bands around right now that do the EpiFat skate-punk thing and there aren’t too many bands who do it well. It’s a genre of music I loved back in the late 90s and I couldn’t wait to discover the newest bands on the PunkoRama comps or on the Fat Wreck samplers. But then pop-punk broke, then emo, and then, well, whatever sub-genre went mainstream changed things forever. Bands like From The Tracks used to be tenapenny. Now they’re harder to find than rocking horse shit. Good bands of this type are even rarer, so God bless FTT, who hail from Scotland and Sweden in equal measure.
This album doesn’t re-invent the wheel, and actually could have come out 10 years ago and sounded just as relevant, but it’s done to such a highly technical standard you have to admire them for not following fashion trends and for writing fast, melodic punk rock with gleeful abandon. ‘Recover’ is choc-full of short, anthemic bursts of bands such as No Use For A Name, Bigwig and all those other fantastic acts. ‘Dead Men’, for instance, has a raucous opening with drums and guitars spitting out all over the place, while ‘Between The Broken and The Swell’ shows the band can do the melodic thing really well without losing any of the vitriol or the pace. And the vocal harmonies…wow.
This is maybe one or two songs too long, but if you like bands like Strung Out and all the good stuff from the mid to late 90s, you’ve probably found your new favourite band. Bravo chaps.