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Be My Doppelganger

No Composure

Written by: PP on 13/12/2010 02:52:04

Be My Doppelganger came recommended to me by one of my friends, who I know likes the same sort of things in his pop punk as I do. It needs to be raw, unpolished, and preferably drenched in energy and small-scale sing alongs. If its tempo is high-octane in nature, all the better. More or less each of these ideas is embedded within "No Composure", a basement pop punk album that finds itself on a shelf lying right next to records by bands like The Dopamines, The Hextalls and other small and heavily underrated bands bringing back punk into pop punk. No fancy haircuts or ultra-poppy ballads here, just simplistic, three-chord pop punk like the genre was meant to be played.

The Dopamines are clearly the closest parallel to be drawn here, but there are occasions where I hear a bit of Face To Face and even The Bouncing Souls in their sound, in a smaller scale of course. Check out the infectious feel-good track "Cha Cha Chump" that's bound to get you off your feet bouncing as a good example. "Turning Seventeen" has a monster-catchy chorus and rightly fits the "happy-go-lucky, no-frills" pop punk description attached to the band. This kind of stuff is recorded to-be-played live for sure, and a song like "Backpack Beers" is sure to be a party-starter, making the small club crowd go wild with mosh pits and the like.

Still, the record is a little too inconsistent for my liking. For every great pop punk hook and catchy chorus, there's another track or section that doesn't quite live up to the high standards set by the songs I've so far mentioned. Some of the songs just feel....anonymous. Either the sing along isn't memorable, or the track otherwise just feels like this genre on auto-pilot. That said, it's still a very decent album that's pulled up by a couple of genuinely great tracks. Lets hope for more consistency on the next one.

Download: Cha Cha Chump, Turning Seventeen, Ordinary Eyes
For the fans of: The Dopamines, The Bouncing Souls, Jetty Boys, The Hextalls
Listen: Myspace

Release date 31.08.2010
It's Alive Records