Tuesday, July 3, 2018

Four Lights - Kobayashi Maru LP - Blue Vinyl

Untitled

Bomb Pop / Stardumb (2018)

Four Lights hail from Seattle and they actually played at the incredible Seattle Pop Punk Festival that I went to in January.  There were a ton of great bands that played that weekend and it was pretty cool to have this album show up in the mail.  Whatever magic Four Lights had as a live band that weekend has absolutely transferred to this album.  It's a gigantic ball of energy from start to finish.

To my ears, Four Lights has successfully threaded the needle between bands like Samiam and Superdrag.  They have the big, crunchy guitars and pounding energy you'd come to expect from the Samiams of the world.  But, they manage to incorporate the sort of hooks, song structures and harmonies that one might expect from some of those Superdrag level bands that snuck onto some major labels back in the 90s (only to end up in the used CD bins of the world for all eternity).

That isn't to say Four Lights is destined for the used bin.  Quite the contrary, this is an album filled with songs that get absolutely lodged into your cranium.  Whether the band is blasting forward full steam on songs like "ComRAD" and "We Got Em"or when they slow things down as they do on "Scene of the Crime" and "Jimmy's Song Part 2" (which reminds me a ton of the band Hospital Job) they always deliver on a big fat chorus that you'll be humming for days afterwards.  I'd not heard of Four Lights prior to the Seattle Pop Punk Festival, but I'm sure glad I did as Kobayashi Maru is good stuff.

Four Lights - Kobayashi Maru:
https://fourlightsrock.bandcamp.com/album/kobayashi-maru

No comments:

Post a Comment