Review Summary: A comfortable guise.
Picture an album that is purposefully designed to be as blood-pumping and adrenaline-rushing as possible. It may not achieve that level of hardcore euphoria, where it constantly delivers brilliant, hard-hitting bangers to turn your old stale moshpit into a full-on, jumping-from-the-stage, tearing-your-clothes-off pitmosh, but it damn well tries. Well, you don’t have to picture it, because the Baltimore based skate-punk hoodlums of Turnstile have attempted that exact feat.
Now, the aforementioned ‘designed’ aspect is necessary to remembered. It will come into play a lot, because you all throughout listening to this album you will have the unsettling feeling, as though it isn’t an actually freeloading, off-the-hook, harsh punk experience, but a slightly conveyor belt manufactured, mathematically calculated product of attempted reminiscence and close homage to the similar outlandish punk dilettantes of the past.
It is odd to have that feeling throw shade on everything throughout this album, especially considering the fact that most songs on here are actually well constructed and pleasantly melodic. The instrumentation isn’t afraid to get versatile and delve into different styles, while still being unified by the sharp production that turns into an easy flow the more tuneful tracks (“Generator”), more traditional pop-punk cuts (“Moon”), those surprising guitar solos (“Can’t Get Away” and “Come Back for More”) or the more abrasive screamo-like ones (anything other than what I named before). And that stylistic unity really does make the whole album more fun and discharged, especially considering the amount of directions the band is subtly (somehow that is possible here) reaching in.
But that discomforting feeling of redundancy is still there. No matter how adventurous and riveting the songs can get, you still feel like you’ve either heard it before or like the just heard contributes not much of significance to your listening catalogue. And that really is the only way to describe this album, it can get incredibly wild and zany-enjoyable, the performances are rock solid (or punk solid, if you will… sorry about that) and the production and sound are all strong and sharp, but all together it somehow works only partially. As if the band wasn’t actually having fun with it, as a band of this sort should, in order to create an impressive record, but sat around in discussion of how to sound as though they’re having fun… Odd predicament.
