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GoldfingerDisconnection Notice Maverick/Warner Goldfinger's latest record gets off to a good start: the gritty My Everything has an angry guitar riff, vocalist John Feldmann gives a passionate delivery of emotive but simple lyrics and the song drops to a catchy, effective chorus. After that, any sort of emotion, passion or point seems to disappear. The California punk natives have been kicking around for a long time now since forming in 1994 and perhaps it's about time they let it go. 'Disconnection Notice' isn't horrendously awful; in fact, it's so inoffensive that it becomes downright, well, offensive. Why should I listen to this record? Why? The first half of the album maintains a sense of catchy fun in the Benji 'Good Charlotte' Madden co-written tracks Wasted and Ocean Size, but without any kind of edge to the slick production (done by Feldmann, who incidentally produced the obscenely popular debut for The Used) which means they just come off sounding like Good Charlotte without the tatts. As the album continues it begins to sound more and more like Feldmann & Co. are simple going through the motions: check the startlingly boring Walk Away with it's banal bridge "I know it will take some work / but I'm not afraid of the dirt." What? The band return to some of their ska roots on tracks like Uncomfortable and Behind The Mask, but the ska ends up just sounding like boring interludes between boring pop-punk. Behind The Mask, an angry vegan call-to-arms, is probably the most layered and complex song on the album and features activist Ingrid Newkirk saying things like "don't be afraid of being radical, all the best people in history have been radical." Maybe Goldfinger should have taken her up on some of her advice. I wish they'd just made a really shit record; at least then I would have cared.  |
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