Review Summary: They aren't kidding.
In the past, I've postulated that pop punk might be the least punk of all genres. Assuming punk is based on ideas of anti-conformity and subverting expectations, pop punk is even less punk than pure pop. While pop at least changes with time by definition, pop punk is marred by a refusal to deviate from it's established sound for the last 20 years.
In their debut album
Greatest Hits, I found Remo Drive guilty of many of these same faults, displaying fun riffs and angsty lyrics, but was painfully uninventive music wise (save perhaps for the bridge of Yer Killing Me). That’s not to say their debut wasn’t enjoyable or that there was nothing to admire, there was just nothing to bring me back that I couldn’t find in a million other similar-sounding albums.
If anything
Pop Music just proved my hypothesis. In straying closer to their pop influences, it seems that they've found more cause to be sonically adventurous, and it shows. Rather than meddling in sound over and over again, there’s a sense of diversity across these three tracks that wasn’t present at all in their full record. There are bright, candy-coated riffs that don’t even pretend to be punk in the slightest; they’d rather just sound fun than feign self-importance. There are fun vocal melodies and instrumental passages that take precedent over them when necessary. Nothing seems as predictable as it might; nothing sounds just like what we’ve heard before. And if that lack of tiresome repetition stems only from the short runtime, then maybe Remo Drive should just stick to EPs from now on. This is the perfect length to fulfill my attention span without them boring me.
The name
Pop Music reeks of the same snark that was featured on their previous album title, and yet this one seems to have been chosen with no great sense of irony. For better or for worse, this is pop music and— actually, come to think of it, no. It is for the better.
