Review Summary: One out of four ain't bad...
Knuckle Puck is yet another pop-punk band looking to break into the modern pop-punk scene; like most of their Pure Noise contemporaries they’re not easy-core, they’re not melodic hardcore and they’re not the sugary pop-punk of 2005. While passing comparisons to Real Friends or I Call Fives may be made, Knuckle Puck sounds closer to Seaway without the underlying sense of humour or over the top Canadian-ness.
“No Good” is undoubtedly the highlight of the EP, it follows the formula for successful pop-punk almost perfectly; catchy, short, well structured, for a three minute song it ticks just about all the boxes it can, sadly the same cannot be said for the rest of the EP. Opening track “Everything Must Go” follows a similar pattern, as openers go it works relatively well but it lacks the catchiness of the closer. The middle tracks present the main issue “Your Back Porch” is a rehash of the opener, doing little to separate itself from the previous track, while “Stateside” sees the band trying to ‘expand’ their sound which is really just a 40 second instrumental intro leading into another generic pop-punk track.
The sad fact of “The Weight That You Buried” is that it would have worked just as well if not better as a two track EP. It doesn’t help that the band is incredibly derivative; the vocals are the same not quite screamed, not quite shouted and not quite sung style that’s been overused ever since “Under Soil & Dirt” was released. Similarly the band does little to separate themselves from their peers instrumentally; if you’ve heard “Everyone That Dragged You Here” then you’ve heard “The Weight That You Buried”. Knuckle Puck have the potential to do better, it’s just a shame they couldn’t be better already, with a record of one in four it might be an idea to change the band name to Fulton Reed.
