Home Read Classic Album Review: The Bouncing Souls | How I Spent My Summer...

Classic Album Review: The Bouncing Souls | How I Spent My Summer Vacation

A decade of punk-trench warfare pays off handsomely on the band's fifth full-length.

This came out in 2001 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):

 


Don’t let the title fool ya. It’s been almost 10 years since these New Jersey punks were in high school. And probably just as long since they spent their summer doing anything other than tooling around the U.S. in a beat-up van playing all-ages gigs for gas money.

That decade of punk-trench warfare continues to pay off in this fifth CD, another collection of solid songcraft and a worthy followup to 1999’s Hopeless Romantic. Once again, the four Bouncing Souls men work from a template of positive pop-punk, stitching together propulsive beats, chiming guitars, gang-vocal choruses and idealistic lyrics into high-octane everyman anthems about the power of music and the belief that it’s never too late to start again. With high-grade stuff like this, it’s about time these kids graduated to the big time.

Previous articleClassic Album Review: King Django | Reason
Next articleClassic Album Review: Randy | The Human Atom Bombs