Pennywise – Reason To Believe
Posted on August 23, 2008 at 8:00 am by Luke
I started getting into Pennywise in the late ‘90’s, right in their prime and in between two of their most highly praised albums, “Full Circle” and “Straight Ahead”. From their beginning they’ve consistently dished out political punk rock by means of fast paced, riff driven anthems with a new full length every other year. I don’t know how they do it considering the formula for each song is the same, but each of those songs gets you stoked and wanting more. Which brings us to their latest effort “Reason To Believe”, their 9th studio album.
For the first time with a Pennywise record I felt unsatisfied, like the album had yet to break into Pennywise form. Sure there are some tunes that have the hardcore punk sound like the brusque “One Reason” with its metallic guitar riff and slowed down blast beats, but the majority of the album feels like they’ve collected some filler tracks from past releases and made them public on “Reason To Believe”. Don’t get me wrong, most Pennywise “fillers” are pretty good, however a good chunk of this latest effort isn’t necessarily bad but doesn’t have the “wow” factor either. For instance, the opening track “(Intro) As Long As We Can” isn’t bad or good apart from the intro portion, which seems like an eternity for us punks with short attention spans (1 full minute of intro-like music that’s really just lagging the launch of the original song).
Lyrically they still take jabs at political and social issues as well as the Western way of life, as seen in the slower “The Western World”. But this mid-tempo record deserves a mid-mark– this actually could’ve been an EP with about 7 or 8 tracks.
Released March 25th, 2008
Pennywise at MySpace
MySpace Records at MySpace
Buy this album at Amazon.com or Amazon.ca
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