Frontside Five

The year is 2006, and punk rock music is viewed by many Gibson-strumming burger flippers as a viable career choice rather than a creative pasttime and a way to have fun with your friends. Hundreds of "punk" bands all across America are aching to become the next Fall Out Boy or Yellowcard, and as a result, live shows are docile and well behaved, and record stores are brimming with gleaming racks of plastic-wrapped formulaic schlock that has all the bite and vitriol of a Ziggy comic strip.

That's why I get so excited when I find something like this. No Pegs, the debut full-length from the Denver-based skatepunk quintet known as Frontside Five, is a refreshing example of all of the things that I love the most about punk rock. The album contains fifteen tracks of energetic, unpretentious, thrashy skate-core (including a Faction cover) that makes a perfect soundtrack for carving concrete or inciting a circle pit rather than cuddling and counting the days until the next Hawthorne Heights album comes out. The riffs are fast and catchy and the shouted vocals are melodic enough to fit right in with the galloping drums and splashing cymbals. The songs, as you might expect, are about skating, skateboards, skate ramps, skating pools, injuries incurred by skateboarding, incarceration, wasted lives, unity and jerking off. By the time you've listened to half the songs on this album, you'll be itching to dust off your board and search for the longest stretch of concrete you can find.

The album is skate-rock, pure and simple. Whether you're into old-school stuff like JFA or Gang Green or contemporaries such as Bones Brigade, this is a fine addition to the genre and I'll be hoping for a live show the next time I'm in Denver. It's thrashy, it's fun, and it's cheap. What excuse do you have not to buy this?