popwreckoning

Just wanted to give a birthday shout-out to our lovely PopWreckoning co-founder, Editor-In-Chief, and favorite indie rocker Jessica McGinley! =)

Wherever you are, we hope you’re having a blast! And if, by chance, Dave Grohl happens to pop out of your birthday cake, we expect full details on Monday morning!

xoxo,
The PW Staff

It’s a cliché, but sometimes an album just speaks to you. Or, in the case of Neon Creeps, yells at you a lot. But that’s the brilliance of O Pioneers!: these guys sing (er, yell) about real life; about meeting real life head on and how absolutely and insanely overwhelming it is. Over a charging hardcore backdrop, front man “Eric” (assuming he’s the front man, as he’s the one making the posts on their MySpace page) shouts out his frustrations with money, old friends, the city and the various problems that everyone deals with everyday.

O Pioneers! pretty much sum it up in the chorus of opener “Saved By The Bell Was A Super Good Show”, with the howling of “DRAMA! DRAMA! DRAMA!” This repeated exclamation neatly summarizes it all, but in the following songs O Pioneers! elaborate. Our life is a movie, Will Sheff: no maybes.

On “9AM Everyday”, the singer grapples with the very difficulty of just getting up to face another day: “And I’m hoping I can sleep through this / and forget about all of the depression / and all of the debt / all of this stress / it just keeps building up.” On “Chris Ryan Added Me On Facebook”, the lyrics detail finding old high school friends on Facebook…unfortunately: “See I’m older now and I don’t give a damn / if I ever talk to you again / I don’t want to regress to / that stupid piece of shit I was back in / high school.” Then closer “Cool Kid City” deals with a feeling poignantly expressed by the band as “No I’m never gonna fit in / down in cool kid city.”

However, the band always pushes through all the bullshit to offer some small kind of hope. Not only are plenty of “don’t let it get you down” and such offered in their songs, but in “I So Told You So”, the singer gets his way and lets everyone know, “I wish I didn’t have to say / I so told you so but I totally do / and it feels so damn good.” Meanwhile in “The Architect of Disneyworld”, the band offers us the greatest hope in that we can recreate the world as we want to: “So many times / have I wished for a chance / just to make a change / and make it permanent…we can burn down bridges just to tear them apart / we can burn down cities just to tear them apart / but it’s up to us / it’s up to us.”

As great as the lyrics are, they’re dependent on the music beneath them to make them worth anything and in the case of Neon Creeps, it never disappoints. While the basis of the band’s sound is undeniably hardcore, like Toronto’s acclaimed Constantines, O Pioneers!’ brand of hardcore sounds strangely more uplifting than it does abrasive. While in a way it could be argued that the point of hardcore was always more about cathartic salvation than any kind of externally-focused confrontation, few bands, including the aforementioned, have managed to make it all sound as personal and listenable as O Pioneers!.

Neon Creeps is a great debut from a great band. Recent albums from ambitious modern hardcore bands like Fucked Up (also from Toronto) have upped the ante for what a hardcore album can be and while O Pioneers! will have to work their way up to that level over time to really matter, they’re off to a great start with Neon Creeps.

Neon Creeps will be available January 27th from Asian Man Records.

Tracklisting:
01. Saved By The Bell was a Good Show
02. The Architect of Disney Land
03. Dead City Sound
04. 9 A.M. Everyday
05. My Life as a Morrisey Song
06. Stressing the Fuck Out
07. I Have a Weightlifting Problem, Bro
08. Chris Ryan Added Me On Facebook
09. I So Told You So
10. Cool Kid City

O Pioneers!: website | myspace

Written by: Marc Z. Grub

Indie Kids! Beards! Music! Cops! Find all this and more over at Saddle Creek Records YouTube Channel. Along every stop of the Winter 2009 Tour, Saddle Creek veteran Cursive is making a tour video featuring performances and exclusive behind the scenes footage from every night of their tour.

This indie rock group helmed by Omahan Tim Kasher has been in the studio working on their follow-up to 2006′s Happy Hollow. The band is known for concept albums filled with biting lyrics.

If this tour isn’t hitting your city, this might be your only chance to hear some of their new material before the album’s release. A few cities are already uploaded with more on the way. One of the current videos does feature a doozie of a new song about freezing temperatures and roads.

A few of the cities already have a few videos up. Begin with the first stop here or check out our personal favorite video from Cleveland, OH:

Tour dates:
Jan 23 – Slowdown / Omaha
Jan 24 – Slowdown / Omaha
Mar 09 – Music Hall of Williamsburg / New York City
Mar 10 – Bowery Ballroom New York City
Mar 13 – Troubadour / Los Angeles
Mar 14 – Casbah / San Diego
Mar 15 – Rhythm Room Tempe
Mar 16 – Launchpad Albuquerque

Cursive: website | myspace | watch Cursive on tour