Mortarboards off to Wayside Kings, a band that knows exactly what it wants to be when it grows up, and isn’t about to shy away from its intended destination any time soon. Slick, stylised American-sounding pop-punk is the name of the game and it’s delivered by the Kent trio in short, sharp bursts of melodic bounciness.
In fairness it would have been easy to copy and paste Paul’s review of last year’s EP here. Like that early release these three tracks are of a pretty high standard without being all that innovative. The vocals again hit the right notes, and there’s a definite tap along insistency going on, whilst musically the drums are particularly strong. So it appears the solid introduction mentioned back in 2009 has led to a strong foundation.
Of the three tracks here (‘Chemistry’ / ‘So Long’ / ‘Blacked Out Summer’ – all available for your listening pleasure on MySpace) closer ‘Blacked Out Summer’ proves to be the strongest. Whilst its counterparts are bubbly pop-punk blueprints, this track divvies it up just a little, throwing in a couple of tempo changes, a bit of a crescendo, some decent guitars, and almost a sense of Vanilla Pod (a band that more UK pop-punk bands should go back and check out). By no means is this track heads and shoulders above the rest on offer here, but it’s definitely something to cling onto when further recording starts.
Ultimately, Wayside Kings, like about a million other bands, may well be a UK band influenced perhaps a little too highly by US bands (New Found Glory, The Movielife, yada, yada, yada) but this is pretty decent stuff. It sounds slick. It sounds poppy. It’ll bring a smile to your face for a few minutes, and then it’ll leave you to the rest of your day. You can’t ask for much more than that from your day-to-day pop-punk band.
Alex