The Guts- Let It Go

Pop punk has seen better days. A genre that once defined bands like the Ramones and Descendents nowadays describes either a.) Radio-friendly modern day emo, complete with autotoned vocals and awful haircuts. Or b.) An underground scene more similar to the Ramones sound, but filled with generic sounding bands and cheesy songs about taking girls to proms, kissing, and other fodder that was covered by doo-wop music.

Out of the later come The Guts. Despite their underground contemporaries, The Guts don't have time singing about childish fodder on their new album "Let It Go". The songs on the album take a realistic look at relationships, heartbreak, and coping through life, and the songs are actually played with aggression, something that many of their contemporaries lack. This is the sort of album that Green Day or Screeching Weasel would make in the mid 90s, and with that generation of pop punk legends making dull sugarcoated power pop (The Queers, Ben Weasel), over indulgent genre bending albums (Green Day), or just making nothing (The Mr. T Experience), Let It Go fills the void as the best pure pop punk album of the last five years. It's probably the best since the much loved Ergs! debut Dorkrockcockrod.

Now is this album perfect? No, a four minute cheesy pop song in the middle of the album, "The Reason", could have easily been left off. And as much as I love the cover of "Love Love Love" with Ben Weasel doing guest vocals, I would have preferred to hear that on a Weasel album, and have The Guts sing it here.

But songs like "Blackout", "Cigarettes and Valentines", and "Down The Drain", each alone make up for these mistakes. The Guts even succeed at a male-female duet, with Hallie Bullit from The Unlovables. In the past few years The Queers, The Ergs!, and The Prozacs, have failed at this, with overtly poppy and sappy shit, but The Guts manage to pull it off.

With the recent demise of The Ergs!, The Guts are moving in as the best modern underground pop punk band. The Fake Boys just put out an EP titled "Pop Punk Is Dead", but Let It Go proves that the genre still has some new tricks hidden up its sleeve.