Album Reviews

On their fifth album, Edmonton’s pop-punks Real Sickies dish out fourteen new tunes that can still be labeled as Ramonescore, but with additional new wave-y, post-punk flourishes. Was it a smart decision to wander off the beaten path and get experimental? Not really.

While I enjoyed the band’s previous releases, I somehow can’t quite get into this one. A song like ‘Should Have Seen It Coming’ is as melodic and infectious as anything they have done in the past. But it is followed by ‘Summer,’ which just sounds off right from the start with vocals that don’t work with the music. At all. Elsewhere, there is some random Devo weirdness going on that doesn’t add much of anything. ‘Destinations’ for example starts off with Marked Men inflections, then collapses onto itself at mid-point with a synth meltdown and doesn’t manage to climb out of the hole it dug itself into. And it’s like that on the rest of the album as well. One song is pretty good, the next one a clunker.

I’m all for bands expanding their sound and trying out new things, but ‘Under A Plastic Bag’ doesn’t do it for me.