Hot Water Music and Bouncing Souls

In emo rock years, Hot Water Music and Bouncing Souls should be swigging bottles of Centrum Silver. Jersey boys Bouncing Souls formed while its members were still in high school in the late '80s, playing manic three-chord nuggets dedicated to their favorite teen movies, BMX bikes and tour high jinks--although their brawny anthems are better suited to hoisting a few pints than turning into a lightweight pop-punk joke. Hot Water Music isn't as crusty or overtly poppy as the Souls, starting in 1994 in Gainesville, Florida, as a dynamic post-hardcore outfit, but the band has likewise maintained its tourmates' ability to twist barbed-wire riffs and chugging tempos into refreshingly nonderivative rock insurrections. Still, the two groups aren't settling into a life revolving around reruns of Murder, She Wrote just yet: Bouncing Souls' 2003 disc Anchors Aweigh crackled with sublimely catchy warp-speed anthems, while Hot Water Music plans to record a follow-up to the spiky stings of 2002's Caution in the coming months. As Aaliyah once said, "Age ain't nothing but a number," so expect these elder statesmen to beat any and all young emo whippersnappers into shape.