If you take four crusty scenesters from various L.A. punk bands, add an unhealthy dosage of Dead Kennedys and Bauhaus influence, and put them in a lo-fi studio to record, then you have a pretty good idea of what Year Future's debut EP has to offer. This is a good thing, isn't it? A sort of punk rock reformation, dragging punk out of the malls and back to its raw, rebellious roots, right?
Wrong. In fact, rather than excitement and energy, this entire album is ultimately bland and uninteresting. The instrumentation is weak and quickly becomes trite and predictable. The vocals are rarely in tune and the spastic screaming just gets tiresome after awhile. The production is decent, except the vocal tracks have a strange reverb that sounds as though they were recorded in a shower or an empty nursing home cafeteria.
While there is definitely room for improvement, some of Year Future's potential occasionally shines through. Only time will tell if their full-length will bring about that punk rock reformation, but judging solely on this EP there is nothing new here, just the same thing that hundreds of other bands have done before and hundreds of other bands have done better.
1/4
