Good quality street punk is hard to come by these days. There’s not enough new bands doing it well enough to comment on and as a result, we have to look to the past if we want to hear the good stuff. Fortunately, a man like Roger Miret is part of the original scene and fortunately for us, has continued to make music when other artists packed it in. Aside from his most well-known project in the form of Agnostic Front, he’s fronted The Disasters since 2000 and their third effort, ‘My Riot’ shows that this is a man who hasn’t lost his touch.
Right from CD opener ‘Warning! Warning!’, you can still hear the 1980s first wave punk influence, from the simplistic power-chord approach taken towards the guitar parts, to Miret’s own vocals that have a distinct Joey Ramone feel to them. In fact, The Ramones influence is something that cannot be ignored on this album. With a song dedicated to the band itself, stuffed full of lyrical homages to Joey, Did, Tommy and Jonny; Miret makes no apologies for his hero-worship of one of the original great punk bands. Elsewhere on the record, there’s a rather special acoustic track named ‘Everything I Do’. While the vocals of the song aren’t the strongest layer to the composition, they are heartfelt and this is an honest punk rock love song in the purest of forms. ‘Fuck You’ is something of a let down in the album’s flow – it’s the token ‘let’s make the fastest riff possible and swear blind into the microphone’ track that seems to make its appearance onto far too many punk records these days, and unfortunately is the weakest 50 seconds here.
‘Pride’ and ‘Once we were Warriors’ stand tall as the finest pieces included here, which make fine use of a very bright-sounding guitar tone and some frankly infectious choruses. These are the kind of songs that make you remember where today’s pop-rock bands sourced their influence from, and show that the oldies still do it best. Overall, ‘My Riot’ is a worthwhile album that is likely to appeal to the majority of punk fans out there. While at times the catchiness of the songs may attract accusations of being ‘pop’, it’s a good showcase of how a punk veteran can still produce solid music worthy of the public’s attention.
Andy R