Review: The Follow Ups – “covers/live”

Mom’s Basement Records, August 7, 2020

The Follow Ups do their thing out of boredom to help our boredom.

The Follow Ups are a sort of Ramonescore band, but they hedge towards the more aggressive end of that spectrum with lots of snotty vocal takes and buzzsaw guitars that don’t sound anywhere near clean or polished.  covers/live is their newest release, an eight song release with three covers and five live in studio takes from their most recent full length …Don’t Like You Either. 

Starting off with three covers, covers/live takes on Gob, Latte+, and Corey Hart (?!?).  The Gob (“B Flat”) and Latte+ (“Missiles”) covers are both fast buzzers with cool riffs and snotty great vocal hooks.  They both hold tight to the originals, right down to the key change near the end of “B Flat”, hitting both well.  The other cover, Corey Hart’s massive “Sunglasses At Night”, sticks at a mid-tempo pace and pulls off the pop hooks pretty well.

The others are all live takes on songs from their awesome full length …Don’t Like You Either.  Each of these have snot and attitude for days and catchy dumb hooks like crazy.  There’s nothing significantly different in these takes, but the sound is a little more raw and ragged without losing the pop instincts that snaked into my brain when I first listened to the record.  My favorites of these are “Love Letters From The Black Lagoon”, “Hey Yo”, and “Monsters”.  The vocal hooks on all three stand out, with great “ow ow-ow”’s on “Love Letters”, awesome “hey yo”’s on “Hey Yo” (an otherwise ridiculous dumb fun song about wrestler Razor Ramon), and fantastic backing vocals on “Monsters”.  Even better, the nasty sound of the crashes, snares, and hi-hats and the serrated guitars and rattling bass just makes me want to see The Follow Ups live whenever all this stuff wraps up.  And I can use stuff like this to keep me optimistic.   

covers/live is what it is, good songs, a couple of fun covers, and a lot of attitude.  Maybe they were bored to do this, but they also helped me deal with some boredom.  So thanks for that.

You might like this if:

• You like The Follow Ups deal and are interested in hearing them pass the time with a bunch of energy

You might not if:

• You’re not into covers and you don’t need any new renditions of the …Don’t Like You Either