The Scutches

Ten Songs, Ten Years [12-inch] (2012)

Joe Pelone

Ignore the lyrics, and the Scutches' new record, Ten Songs, Ten Years, is a fairly catchy batch of pop punk tunes in the vein of the Ramones, the Queers and Mean Jeans. Yeah, it's a tried ‘n' true style, but it's still a winner.

Ten Songs delivers exactly what its title promises, as the two-piece rips through a series of songs about break-ups and feelings and what-not. The vocals are nasally, the guitars are slightly surfy, the whole thing feels like a Joey Ramone tribute, albeit a competently played one.

Where the band gets itself into trouble is the lyrics. They're pretty basic, as they cover falling in and/or out of love just about all the time, in true pop punk fashion. Unfortunately, they also occasionally devolve into real groaners, like on these opening lines from "Glad You're Gone:" "I'm like an old poem that a school teaches / Yet Bobby Frost ain't got nothing on this." You know who else gives nicknames to literary legends? ">Fucking LFO. That shit needs to stop.

Still, this is pop punk we're talking about here. That's a genre with a proud tradition of not growing up. Bearing that in mind, the Scutches are fun enough. They're not mind-blowingly different, nor do they need to be. But they do bring the rock. Some of these tunes are actually quite infectious ("Only For a Minute," "Full Steam Ahead"). The only thing really holding the band back would be the lyrics, but again, this is pop punk. Those can be ignored too.