Review Summary: Easycore! Oops, Pop Punk's Not Dead!
Congratulations, New Found Glory. Your collective mid-life crisis has created exactly what the listening world needs: another closed-minded group of fans who think that their favorite genre is the best. To be fair what were you to do? You could not ride the easycore bandwagon anymore. That fad died once Four Year Strong and Set Your Goals realized they wanted to be serious musicians instead of breakdown-heavy party-rockers. You could not write another "experimental" album, considering the first one you wrote was just a formulaic New Found Glory album, performed at half-tempo, with the occasional piano line thrown in for "depth." No, all you could was crawl back to the only album you have the talent to write, and try to pop-punk harder than anyone has pop-punked before.
All of this would be fine if New Found Glory would have just shut up, accepted their place in the music industry, and just pressed on as their generic, whiny selves. However, Alternative Press and a whole new crop of New Found Glory-inspired bands told them otherwise.
Seriously?
Anyway, New Found Glory were smart enough to realize that they could not rescue themselves from obscurity, so they started name-dropping Green Day, The Ramones, and Rancid as influences to promote their new album. They even created a trendy, new #poppunksnotdead tour to replace the now obsolete #easycore tour fad that just recently died.
As for the album itself, a simple juxtaposition between it and one of the albums it claims to draw influence should tell you all you need to know. When Billie Joe Armstrong broke up with his serious girlfriend, he wrote a song called "When I Come Around." In this song, he admitted how pathetic he was, and his yearning to be a better man because of it. It sounded great following self-pitying hits such as "Longview" and "Basket Case," and now sounds even better when sung live by the man who improved himself and married the same girl. Conversely, the title track from this new album is about Jordan missing a girl so much that he needs radiosurgery. He does not want to better himself, he just wants to remove a part of his brain. The next song "Anthem For the Unwanted," glorifies being a pushover, and the rest of the album does not improve. It follows the same, patented "opening riff-clunk clunk clunk-hook-repeat" pattern with no Green Day influence, Rancid influence, or *gasp* original ideas to be found.
That is the difference between a band like Green Day and a band like New Found Glory: Green Day cannot stand to play their old material, while New Found Glory is still hanging onto theirs for dear life. The strange part is that people still favor New Found Glory because of it. If pop-punk is destined to become another stale, blindly-supported genre, someone please kill it.
