By my reckoning we must be onto something like the sixth or seventh generation of the North American pop-punk genre by now. If the Descendents, Bad Religion and the Vandals were the originals; then a few years later Screeching Weasel, NOFX and the Offspring; onto Green Day, No Use For A Name and Guttermouth; then Blink-182, Goldfinger and New Found Glory; and into the new millennium with Sum 41, Motion City Soundtrack and The Starting Line.
After that there’s a few layers of shit; then, somewhere, clutching onto the underside of the barrel like a desperate crustacean, we come across All Time Low, Hit The Lights, Set Your Goals, Cute Is What We Aim For and Forever The Sickest Kids. These bands operate in a musical realm that cannot be called punk in even the loosest sense of the word. However watered down, contrived and insipid you like your punk, this is worse.
Forever The Sickest Kids are more boy-band than punk band. This is pop music for people with a chip on their shoulder, a soundtrack for wetting the bed. It’s music for children, really stupid children with their caps on backwards. This is the genre’s perpetual decline, an all-American race to the bottom; inevitable perhaps, regrettable nonetheless.
J.A.C.K. (an acronym of the four band members’ first names: Jonathan, Austin, Caleb, Kyle – n’awwwwwww, how sweet!) is FTSK’s third record of puerile, brainless drivel. It seems to have been processed through some sort of Nintendo/Nickelodeon collaborative hyper-real bubblegum alterna-world, where everything’s blindingly shiny and auto-tuned to fuck. Listening to Jonathan Cook sing is like listening to a whining teenager. ‘You gotta learn to love yourself before you love someone else… Just another kiss from a wannabe beauty queen… Everyone I know swears that she’s cheating on me…I heard that parents don’t like when bad guys date their daughters…’ YOU’RE ADULTS, STOP SINGING ABOUT BOYS AND GIRLS AND SCHOOL AND BULLIES, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!
I’m not the target market, I know that, but if you are you deserve so much better than this sterile shower of shit. Pop-punk does not have to be like this. This is offensively bad, a whole new level of bad for an already profoundly poor band. When I’m king this band will be outlawed. I’d rather shit in my hands and clap than listen to anything by them ever again. Now please go away and grow a pair you chirpy, rosy-eyed bastards.
ANDREW REVIS