The Neutron Bombs

The Neutron Bombs are a newly formed punk band from Chicago who sound like they stepped out of 1977 London. Fortunately unlike cartoony jokes like The Casualities or Blanks 77 who are often the ones associated (or associate themselves) with these comparisons, Neutron Bombs spare us all the phony dress up and actually play good music. Fronted by cockney voiced singer Ken Ortman (who was best known to me as the guy who briefly played second guitar for The Methadones when Dan Vapid wanted to focus on just singing), the band is rounded out by current Methadones bassist Pete Mittler, and a drummer named Colin, whose last name is currently unbeknownst to me. Currently the band has some of their rehearsals recorded, which despite being pretty raw, all sound surprisingly good. The band plans to start recording in a studio soon, hopefully a label like Red Scare Industries or Dan Vapid's new label, Transparent Records, will help a Neuron Bombs album see the light of day in the near future. For now you can check out their stuff at www.myspace.com/theneutronbombs.

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.

The Ergs! (2000-2008)

So it's been a while since I updated, school and all other sort of stuff has been in the way but I want to try to get back in to this thing.

In the months since I've been gone a pretty important band broke up, and with the end of the year and people being bound to get those retrospectives of those who have died in the past year, I figure this would be an appropriate time to discuss The Ergs!

If The Ergs! never reunite they will likely go down with Operation Ivy as bands who achieved most of their recognition after they broke up. In the time after they announced they were calling it quits they were already showing signs of this, I saw kids at school who got their t-shirts, and the band got on a tour with Less Than Jake. Even days after they broke up I noticed that the band got a post-humous wikipedia article written about them. I'm guilty to getting into the band late myself. The first Ergs song I heard was"Kind Of Like Smitten" the first song from their EP "Jersey's Best Prancers" and in my opinion their worst song. Based on that I wrote the band off as another cheesy pop punk band. But it was their set at the 2007 Insubordination Fest that won me over, where the band better showcased their catalogue to me. Their performance of Most Violent Rap Group/Pray For Rain was probably the best performance included on the Insubordination Fest DVD.



Here it is so you can see it yourself, I love that kid in the yellow shirt at 3:01 into the video, who's throwing his hands up and screaming the "how everything's gone wrong" part of the song. There's obviously a big emotional connection between the lyrics and the fans.

Eventually I bought The Ergs! first album Dorkrockcorkrod, and was not disappointed. The album is has the most heartfelt and emotional, songs about life's relationships since the Descendents or Green Day's first album and early EP's. Dorkrockcorkrod was like emo but without the whining.

Before their breakup I always thought the band was the best out of that whole New York/New Jersey underground pop punk scene, and of all the bands who frequented the pop punk bored, were the most likely to get signed to a major, or at least get a deal with a large minor label like Fat Wreck. Obviously this won't happen now, but It'll be interesting to see where the band members will go from here. Much like The Damned broke up in 1978 and re-formed within the next year, I could see The Ergs! doing the same thing. There is already a large amount of fans including friends of the band trying to get them to reform for this years Insubordination Fest. But if The Ergs! don't reunite any time soon all eyes will be on the bands singer/drummer Mikey Erg. In the past Mikey has stayed in the background and drummed for lesser bands like The Unlovables and Short Attention, who's goofy songs come nowhere close to those of The Ergs! Hopefully instead of keeping stuff like this up Mike will soon front another band, but until then we'll have The Ergs! catalogue to listen to.