CLASS - A Healthy Alternative (2024) Hi-Res

"My mates went on holiday to the Isles for this one. Galactic romantic entropy three sheets to the 'Wind. Saxy glimmers, broken sunbeams, oil dancing in a puddle of water in a parking lot somewhere in St. Louis or Birmingham. And just as first-wave yankee punk was decidedly solipsistic, the Poms folded in a more civic bent to explain the zeitgeist of generational disaffection. Is "Scared To Care" about spikey punks whose apartments are littered with Amazon boxes? Is "Biggest Sale of The Year" an indictment of late-stage capitalism? Is "The Milkman" an effective populist who wants you to sink so that he can swim? Is this record more political than those dystopian hardcore records you sold when a nice girl opened your eyes once? Merely conjecture...

It's an album dripping with clandestine musical intelligence, artisanal song-writing, great voices. The illegitimate son of Dinosaurs' bassist isn't in the mix this time, but I can assure you his spirit is there - I can almost hear the glass of side mirrors cascading to Richmond Ave on a drunken bike ride 15 years before Josh Allen and Conway The Machine made The City That Always Sleeps cool! (NOT recommended... you truly cannot cheat Carma).

What is soul? Soul is finding your own catalytic converter at the thrift store. Soul is trying out for the Harlem Globetrotters on your 37th birthday and it not going so well. Soul is wearing those attractive bygone eras on your sleeve without hesitation or embarrassment. Pentatonic rock didn't exactly bubble from a serious bog, and when adults who partake become artistically conservative, grow egos in a Petri dish somewhere in the well-adjusted hyper-capitalist cityslicker life they've created because they can seemingly play Vibrators riffs better than the actual kids, everything is lost! Class know this, resisting that spiritual deficit of our collective moment with the voice of honest men trying to have fun in this fuckin' wacky world, unafraid to rhyme words like "narcissist" and "anarchist". I mean, how many songs wouldn't have a pinky toe to pirouette on if "school" and "fool" didn't rhyme?! Now get your ass to Class." -Brandon Gaffney