Audio By Carbonatix
They might be terrible dressers, they might have chosen a dreadful band name, they might even be friends with those dorks the Get Up Kids, but don’t let anyone tell you that Lawrence, Kansas, popsters the Anniversary aren’t crafty: Designing a Nervous Breakdown, the band’s tuneful 2000 debut, packed just enough fussy antique-synth effluvium to put some reasonable distance between its whiny puppy-love songs and the soppy post-Pinkerton dross everyone was using the E-word to describe and deride. On its recent follow-up, January’s Your Majesty, the band narrowly escapes homogeneity again, utilizing all kinds of unnecessarily knotty song-structure tricks and ’70s-rock sonic signatures to differentiate itself from the innumerable pop-punk bands treading serious post-Maladroit water. An A for ingenuity, if not for songcraft. Blitzed Philadelphia rockers the Burning Brides are clever, too–they even got V2 to relaunch Fall of the Plastic Empire, the snappy debut Philly indie File 13 released last year to a strong underground buzz. Like the Anniversary, the Brides just barely skirt genre convention, delivering familiar pleasures (Stooges riffs) in a package novel enough to warrant closer inspection (Nirvana choruses); they seemed right at home warming up for Queens of the Stone Age this summer. New York-based openers Lo-Hi, featuring Boss Hog drummer Hollis Queens, aren’t so resourceful; their second album, Say It More, offers the rote rumble of the neo-garage scene with little of the sparkle that has occasionally made that revival seem worthwhile.
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