Motion City Soundtrack
My Dinosaur Life
Columbia Records
I’ll be honest. I do not like poppy-punk. Groups like Good Charlotte, The Ataris, Metro Station, etc. make me long for fingernails down a chalkboard. They come across as rule-breaking “punks” with their messed up/ colored/ long/ goofy hair and tattoos all over the place, but the music screams “corporate whiners.” Motion City Soundtrack was another band that I lumped in this crap-punk category. The only reason I even wanted to listen to this album was because the website metacritic.com scored their latest album My Dinosaur Life an 88 out of 100, a score that is almost unheard of. So, I thought I’d give it a whirl. It was one of the best decisions I’ve made all year.
Motion City Soundtrack takes the pop-punk genre and fully embraces it by launching instantly catchy hooks with lyrics that are so clever, they will make you say, “Damn, why didn’t I think of that?”
The modern-day classic “Pulp Fiction” is a prime example of that, with its can’t-get-out-of-your-head chorus, “It’s like a bad dream/ Something from the back of a magazine/ Black and white and cheaply put together/ Like a slasher film/ I’m torn in opposite directions/ The plot sucks but the killings are gorgeous.”
The first single, “Her Words Destroyed my Planet,” is the perfect launching pad for worldwide super-stardom. Lead vocalist Justin Pierre laments, “I’ve been drowning in memories/ Call it residual blues/ I fell asleep watching Veronica Mars again,” and “I just miss what I thought we would have.”
The bass-and-drum lead “Delirium” is an interesting first-person take on mental illness. “I swim the pharmaceuticals/ The medicine deactivates/ The things I take/ The things that take me.”
My Dinosaur Life is the first full album that I have heard from Motion City Soundtrack, and it makes me want to hear the rest of the catalog. I love everything about this album for the exact reasons that I hate the genre. From the first time I heard it, I couldn’t get enough. Whether it’s the lyrics (some of the best I’ve heard in a long time), the insane catchiness of each track, or the combination of both, this album has become a staple in my collection and an early contender for Best Album of 2010.
Motion City Soundtrack: http://www.motioncitysoundtrack.com
