Artist: The Friday Night Boys
Album: Off The Deep End
Label: Fueled By Ramen/The Party Scene/Photo Finish Records
Purchase: Fueled By Ramen Webstore
Release Date: June 9th, 2009
Overall: 9.0
Music: 8.5
Lyrics: 8.5
Production: 9.0
Pop-punk is a genre where it’s to easy to get written off and compared to another band, and to hard to stand on your own. This leads us to The Friday Night Boy’s debut album on Fueled By Ramen Records entitled Off The Deep End. This title is all to appropriate for what The Friday Night Boys are doing, they have already dived into a genre that is so filled with no-name, flavor of the week bands and positioned themselves at the fore-front of the genre.
Off The Deep End starts off strong with the track “Permanent Heartbreak”, this is the perfect track to start the album off with as it features everything The Friday Night Boys are good at doing: anecdotal lyrics, catchy rhythms, and an incredibly powerful chorus that begs to be screamed at concerts nationwide. It’s a recipe for success and one that the boys have spent no time perfecting in their own unique way (See: “Hollow”’s guitar riff and “Molly Makeout”’s chorus) with electronic beats and an impressive vocal showing from singer Andrew Goldstein.
At each and every turn of the record there is more reason to fall in love with the sound shown. Whether it be the quaking bass of “Suicide Sunday”, or the blistering electronic beats of “How I Met Your Mother”, each and every track brings its own hook or special something that makes it different from the other tracks and solidifies the ability to dance around the genre every which way.
Even when they slow things down like in the song “Finding Me Out” and “Can’t Take That Away”, and “The First Time” it’s all to obvious that the boys themselves hold with them a certain charm that makes them accessible to mostly everyone. Even though the occasional shameless plucking of heart strings is something you may have to hear, it’s all apart of the grand package.
While it might be easy for critics and haters alike to write off the Friday Night Boys as just another one of those bands that are here today, gone tomorrow. It is very plain to see that they have a lot to bring to the table as far as music is concerned, they are keen artists with a knack for catchy riffs, melodies and hooks galore. It will be beyond interesting to see where they take there music from here, seeing just how deep they can go.