Watching recent music television it is easy to be fooled into thinking that young kids into punk only care about emo, metalcore, and hardcore with passionless unfocused anger, or present styles pushed by industry bands of the day. Remember all those "Youth" punk band names in the eighties? Portland's Autistic Youth are a band who missed out on those events due to their members being born much too late but as evidenced in their band name take inspiration from that particular time period. Autistic Youth chose the Autistic part of their name as they have an autistic friend who wanted to be in a band with them
On this two song 7" Autistic Youth have a punk-pop sound similar to what was coming out from California in the early eighties. It's actually close to The Adolescents or the harder songs on The Descendents' "Milo goes to College" album. This youthful band's tightness puts many more mature bands to shame. On both songs there's plenty of well placed woohoahoo's which if placed wrong or overdone are plain annoying. The vocals while punkish retain melody and there's nice guitaring and really tight drumming. There's no denying both songs sound similar but for my money "Desperate" is slightly stronger than the title track. There's no new ground broken here but it is an enjoyable rehash of days gone by and evokes memories of wearing board shorts and dreams of riding waves.
Desperate can be heard on Autistic Youth's myspace page
The 7 inch can be ordered from Black Water Records
This review was originally written for the peacedogman webzine.
2 comments:
Saw this band in California about a year ago. They were real boring live eh.
Hey, Sam. Nice blog/zine. I've linked you. Were they supporting someone better live?
The music on the 7 inch impressed me anyway.
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