Thousand Island Records — 03 November 2020
Winning Streak are well versed in punk & pop punk elements of both old and new with a sound somewhere in between Fat Wreck & Fueled By Ramen. In their newest release, We Need A Plan, out November 3rd on Thousand Island Records, the band pulls all the stops and leaves no space unfilled by a sweet sweeping guitar lick. They know all the tricks and pull some fancy footwork of their own with the kick-kick-kick of the double bass and the ever present noodling of at least one guitar.
We Need A Plan as a whole invokes the feeling of the early 2000s, when punk, pop punk, and bands that fell into the else, were all churning out high energy hour-long albums with big production budgets. While listening to the album, I found myself trying to nail them down to a specific root band, but by the next track, I found myself thinking of a different band. If I had to fit them into a box, I’d say they’re the love child of 88 Fingers Louie and Lagwagon and that child spent some years with the early Drive-Thru Records catalog and maybe saw The Wonder Years a few times and actually dug it. Musically, the album lends itself well to pop punk. The songs aren’t overly seasoned with vapid tales with easy rhymes about leaving home and remembering when things were better before all of your friends left, and I think that’s what really separates this from that, because it also isn’t just punk. The songs tend to express the malaise associated with everyday American life, not knowing how to fight back against the evil you see when your own demons won’t even let you leave the bed, y’know, something we can all relate to . I found the songs themselves not too easy to be sung along to; there were a few songs where the chorus and the verses were indistinct from one another and without the help of a backing vocal, you’re just listening to a guy tell a story and ya know what, that’s okay!
The guitar work in this album is exemplary and much kudos must be given to the gentleman who found a way to squeeze in weedle-y-dees in the most impossible, tightest musical turns. There is never not a point in this album where one guitar isn’t doing some of the craziest shit you ever heard in punk rock.
We Need A Plan is like a walk down punk memory lane, a peek back through the doorway of the bands you grew up on or maybe grew out of, without reliving all your high school cringe, just the adult-kind now.
Favorite Tracks: “Positivity (Everything is Screwed)” “Anchor in You”
