REVIEW: Firestarter – ‘Forget The Past’

Artist: Firestarter
Album: Forget the Past
Genre: Pop punk

My music tastes have changed and expanded quite a bit over the years, but I’ll be the first to admit that I’m still a sucker for the classic pop punk introduction of a catchy riff followed by a cymbal crash and a ringing guitar chord. I’ve heard it dozens of times before, in Day At the Fair’s “Eastern Homes and Western Hearts,” New Found Glory’s “Hit Or Miss,” and The Wonder Years’ “Mike Kennedy Is a Bad Friend,” to name a few, but it never fails to get me pumped up for what’s to come.

In that regard, Firestarter’s new EP, Forget the Past certainly starts off on the right foot. After the intro, the title track is a fun, tightly executed pop punk track that suffers only from the occasional awkward or cliché lyric (“Let’s have the time of our lives as we look to the sky / This flame will never die with our poor attempts to fly”). That is the template for the bulk of the record. The guitar riffs shine on “Who You Used To Be” and “Lost and Found,” and the bouncy ending of “Tiny Bandages” is a great throwback to the Drive-Thru era, but unfortunately, no single song on Forget the Past manages to bring all of the elements together nicely.

A nice change of pace comes on “Woodlawn,” which takes a cue from the Real Friends playbook, stripping down the instrumentation to clean electric guitars as vocalist Matt LaPerche gets emotional about old friends and the way one person can profoundly touch another’s life. On the whole, it is the strongest track on Forget the Past, and I imagine it makes for a powerful moment in Firestarter’s live show.

With a new pop punk band like Firestarter, comparisons to Real Friends, Man Overboard, and the like are inevitable and apt, but they aren’t necessarily unfavorable. Forget the Past can easily hold its own against both bands’ most recent releases. In light of the flaws described earlier, that probably says more about the state of the genre than about Firestarter themselves, but it makes for a good challenge for this band and their peers going forward: Give us something we don’t expect. Push your own creative limits and push the definition of “pop punk band” in new directions. That is where truly great music comes from.

SCORE: 7/10
Review written by Troy Sennett (follow him on Twitter)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AclifREy5lA

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