ProRawk Records, 14 February 2022
The Radio Buzzkills Get Even better on new full-length.
St. Louis punks The Radio Buzzkills are one of the better snotty punk bands going at the moment. I've been on board for a while, having been a fan of earlier albums including Get Fired, Get Lost, and Get Bored. With each album, the songwriting gets sharper, the hooks sink in deeper, and the fun gets more obnoxious. Get Even keeps up the winning streak with 14 songs of infectious pop punk that's some of the best around.
Get Even takes no prisoners right from the start. The one-two blast of “I Want My Records Back” and “Movin' Out” nearly knock me over. This is agitated punk rock fun loaded with angst and snarling attitude. “I Want My Records Back” opens with a hypermelodic and quick lead guitar, throws in some garbled lead vocals from Zach and some great “ooh-whoa-uh-oh's” dancing across the backdrop from Jen, and sells it all with a few stop-and-go rhythmic hooks. Then it launches into the rampager “Movin' Out” that gets over and out in about 50 seconds. Both wallow in a sort of no remorse defiance, not the last to be found on here. “Never Gonna Get My Best” keeps the theme alive with Zach slinging words in a stumbled sneer overtop chugging guitars and in front of more cool backing vocals from Jen. The delivery and phrasing on the quick-spit “never never never gonna get my best” sticks for days.
All that said, Radio Buzzkills aren't fully consumed by vindictiveness. Throughout Get Even, they sprinkle in some fantastic regrets along the way. Songs like “Date Night” and “King of Jerks” dig deep into mess-ups and apologies. “Date Night” has more melodic guitar leads and some great vocal hooks drop by at the end of lines (“na na na” and “whoa-uh-oh” type-stuff) and words like “everything I've done to help has only made things worse” hits home. “King of Jerks” works in a cool rising guitar riff and Zach's quick phlegm vocals knock up just right against Jen's backing “ahh's” and lyrical mimics. The guitar lead on the bridge is good stuff, too.
Beyond the Get Even songs that revel in those lyrical motifs there are a bunch of other great songs. “I Fell For You” (with Jen taking over the lead vocals) and closer “Broken A String” are a little more mid-tempo, each loaded up with endearing earworm hooks. I have found myself singing the “never gonna get it, never gonna gonna get it right” refrain from “Fell” all the time and the vocal arrangements and lead guitars on “A String” are pure pop goodness. The snotty, catchy “Mad Mike” works in cascading lead guitars and hook-laden and topical lines including and “I'm a stable genius” while “Please Don't Go” slows things considerably while tossing in some quiet-loud dynamics as Zach sings with more than a tinge of desperation, a kind of pop punk grunge song almost. The Buzzkills even pull of a sort of doo-wop-type thing on “Then Came Thorazine”. The song itself is a banger, thrusting forward with lots of buzzing momentum and agitated vocals that are offset by Jen's “shoo-bop, sh-bop” backings. It's absurdly catchy.
I've been listening to Get Even a bunch for a couple weeks now, and I'm pretty sure I've yet to skip past a song during a sit-down. Every song on here has nuggets of catchy pop that plant the flag for pop punk. I could listen to this sandwiched between Screeching Weasel's Anthem For A New Tomorrow and Sloppy Seconds' Destroyed and not have it seem out of place. On this one, the Radio Buzzkills Get Even better.
Favorite song: “I Want My Records Back”
Favorite moment: the strain in Zach's voice when singing “then came thorazine” on song of the same name
Favorite whatever else: the “never gonna get it right” refrain on “I Fell For You”
ryan is a reviewer and news editor for TGEFM. He's very secretive, he might be an alien.
