Review Summary: New Found Glory meets the All-American Rejects, ten years too late and an ocean away.
Globalisation and the rise of the Internet have had just as many nefarious effects on society and culture as positive ones, but undoubtedly among the most enriching was the increased ease of distribution for artistic and creative materials. In a scant few decades, most countries and regions went from being restricted to strictly their local product – or, in some scenarios, strictly the local product their government wanted them to see – to having widespread and almost immediate access to artistic endeavours from even the most far-flung corners of the world. Suddenly, in the span of only a few years, it became possible for Indonesians and Filipinos to get acquainted with the Ramones, for Americans to discover Swedish melodic death metal, and for a group of young men from a seaside town in Southern England to be influenced by a movement born and bred in a whole other shoreline, fifteen years and two oceans away.
Said group of young men were Corrigan, a Brighton punk-pop band from the late 2000s and early 2010s who, perhaps inspired by the beach-resort atmosphere of their home town, set out to create sunny, summery music, which sourced its main inspiration, not from the local contemporary emo and post-punk revival scenes, but from the genre a few similarly-minded ensembles had helped popularise all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, in the middle years of the previous decade.
In fact, the overall sound on the group’s first and only album, the aptly titled
’94 and Before (which, unlike what the name might hint at, is not a compilation but a fully-fledged debut) owes more to what American teenagers were creating in their garages in the mid-1990s than to anything coming out of the United Kingdom – or elsewhere in Europe, for that matter – during the first decade of the new millennium. Delivering sub-three minute songs named after girls and retro-vintage pop-culture references, with lyrics expounding on relationships and feel-good vibes, and built around palm-muted riffs, fast beats and nasally melodic vocals, Corrigan follow the second- and third-generation ‘90s pop-punk formula to a T, with many moments on this album directly evoking bands such as New Found Glory (the vocals, in particular, are often highly reminiscent of Jordan Pundik’s), Bowling For Soup, Good Charlotte, Yellowcard (minus the violin) or even early Fall Out Boy. The group’s main differential, and arguably their only link to contemporary movements of the time, is the prominent use of a Casio organ, which serves the function normally reserved for a lead guitar, and creates the melodies which help distinguish one song from the next. Even this gimmick, however, is a direct reference, not to any act coming out of Britain, but rather to an American band, having first been innovated by the All-American Rejects - whom Corrigan end up sounding like a slightly heavier version of for large portions of the album.
In fact, ‘New Found Glory meets the All-American Rejects’ is a more than reasonably accurate description for what the Brighton group present across the eleven songs and thirty-two minutes of their sole release. Most of the numbers on
’94 and Before overlay a playful keyboard line over the aforementioned palm-muted riffs and fast, driving beats, topping the whole off with a variably catchy chorus, which – along with the keyboard melodies – acts as the main identifier for each individual song. This formula is established to great effect on opener
Problem – the stickiest and most instantly memorable track of the bunch – and very rarely deviated from in the subsequent half-hour, give or take a slightly slower tempo here and there (
Same Again hinges on a staccato riff lifted directly from
All Killer, No Filler, while closer
One By One is a pop-punk ballad, reminiscent of what bands like Green Day, Blink-182 or – again – New Found Glory or Good Charlotte have also presented in this regard). The result is an album which, while mostly successful at creating a fun, upbeat and pleasant atmosphere, does at times feel slightly repetitive - especially on songs with somewhat less memorable choruses (
Ana) or where the keyboard lines themselves sound directly derivative from an earlier point on the album, like on the otherwise stellar, Bowling For Soup-esque
Ferris Bueller.
Still, even these less effective moments are more than made up for by most of what surrounds them. At its best,
’94 and Before is a top-notch slice of classic punk-pop, and tracks like the aforementioned
Problem,
Same Again, Ferris Bueller and
One By One, along with the likes of
Hey Kathy or the short-but-sweet
Radio, deserved to have been devised fifteen years earlier, somewhere in Southern California. Had that been the case, Corrigan would have probably had their day in the California sun, and probably gotten to tour with their idols and make up the numbers on some edition or another of Vans Warped Tour; displaced as they were in time and space, however, the best they could manage was to be a decidedly above-average underground act, whose decidedly above-average one-and-done record deserved a better fate than to have slipped under the radar of early-2010s pop-punk fans. Still, that is the kind of unfortunate conjuncture platforms such as Bandcamp were built to correct, and - with the album currently up for free and legal download on band member Mark Random’s music page on that website - perhaps Corrigan may be able to belatedly enjoy the popularity they should have attained first time around. Based on what they present on their first and only album to date, they certainly do deserve it.
DOWNLOAD IT FOR FREE HERE: https://markrandom.bandcamp.com/album/94-and-before
Recommended Tracks
Problem
Same Again
Ferris Bueller
Radio
One By One
