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Plainsunset, Songs For The Emotionally Wounded – A few years ago I got the first Plainsunset album, Runaway, which had been released in 1999, and enjoyed it as a collection of good, raw, fun pop punk, with groovy tunes like “Cindy Crawford” and “Runaway”. This, their second album, released in 2001 (and then re-issued with acoustic bonus songs in 2007) is a slick vehicle with some relatively weak “driving punk” exercises, followed up by un-exciting acoustic demos. It took a while for me to warm up to it, but as I listen to it more and more, I do find a bit more of the soul behind the production, gimmicks, and borrowed production values.
Opening song “We’re Not In” has all of the groovy sounds of a slick pop punk number (the drumming, while snazzy, seems to be a bit off), and it speeds up and becomes a pretty decent bopper with (mostly) the right chops, it sounds very familiar, having been informed by a steady diet of NOFX and Weezer. Second song “Immature” is a confessional love song, it keeps the pace high enough, and has some good technical moments, like the groovy guitar effects “solo”, but it’s also fairly lazy until the rock-out ending. “Priorities” may have some Fugazi-style screaming, but it’s also a pretty mild-mannered pop song, with some “I saw the way you looked at him and I kept it deep inside” lyrics that would make for a pretty cliched young-punks-out-of-love rock video. “Find A Way” has some groovy strumming and kind of soars nicely, the best song on the album so far, despite wishy-washy lyrics (“I said I’m sorry” x3). “Boy Band” sounds way a lot like Nirvana’s version of “Molly’s Lips”. This is a good thing, because it shows them finally getting crazy, “I will be in a boy band and get away with it, I’ll write a book about it”. Okay – nice.. nice-ish, at least. “Talk About It” has a thin-sounding bass-driven chorus that sounds quite wrong, and since it has nothing to distinguish it in the rest of the song (other than a nice guitar sound in the brief spells when there’s guitar), I’ll suppose that they just had bad advice on this one. “Love Songs For The Emotionally Wounded” is a guitar arpeggio-driven ballad that sounds like something from Bobby Vinton, or something. Yes, a song that takes itself seriously, even if I can’t… which then jumps into a song simply called “Plainsunset” which is very hard driving, melodious punk that really sounds great – the band saved the best for last.
In the next number, a 15-minute untitled “hidden” track, they have five minutes of silence, followed by a minute of found sounds edited together to sound like a stroll across the radio dial, then the song starts up – first off, it’s actually a live version of “Find A Way” (the crowd is right into it, which is cool), then a bit more radio dial fussing before it gets into a strong version of “Runaway”, from their first album. “Children (Acoustic)” is a pretty little song, and then “Find A Way” sounds pretty okay as a chilled out acoustic song.” The last time is “New Time. The Epilogue (Acoustic)”, is a pretty nice little song, with guitar, piano, some background singing. A cool demo for a chilled-out song.