Saturday, April 16, 2011

The Dopamines/Dear Landlord - Portrait Parle


Holy fucking shit, guys. Dear Landlord and The Dopamines have released a split together! This is like, proof of some sort of pop punk afterlife and pop punk gods. You guys must not worship false Idles, alright?

So, anyway, Dear Landlord are this incredible pop punk band from Minneapolis, and everyone in the world loves them and their Dream Homes full length. The Dopamines are from right here in Cincinnati, and everyone loves them for their everything...but they still throw beers at them while they're performing. Seriously, my friend Amanda was standing at the very back of the crowd during one of their sets and got hit with a full beer, and then it drenched her. It was funny. Point is, both bands are amazing pop punk bands who rule the scene and fuck your girlfriends.

So anyway, I'll start off with the Dear Landlord half!

The first song is called "Neighbors" and is about neighbors you have when you live in a trailer park. By the way, their dream home is a double wide trailer. What does your dream home look like? This song may not sound like all the other Dear Landlord songs at times, due to the different strumming pattern (more of a Dirt Bike Annie type thing, but only if they were called like Dirtier Bike Annie), but it slips back into the style you expect pretty frequently throughout. It's another anthem, but nothing will ever stand at the height of shouting "I live in hell!" or "We're not that hopeless! We're not as fucked as you think!" Well, I really wouldn't put it past these guys to release bigger anthems, because they're amazingly talented with that kind of thing...but it hasn't happened here. 

Actually, "A Little Left" is a pretty awesome anthem. Maybe Dear Landlord should've went back in time and stole the Kid Dynamite album title "Cheap Shots, Youth Anthems". I mean, KD wrote a lot of anthems, but Dear Landlord are like the pop punk version of that. "I might be hanging by a fucking thread, but there's a little left to live with!" If you're not singing along, you're Data from Star Trek...I think Picard would even sing along, because doesn't he get angry from time to time? Yeah, so you're Data or some other form of robot if you don't sing along to this song. 

Dopamines side, fuckers.

Prepare to be blown away. Or if you have pixie stix on your dicks, prepare to be blown. Point is, The Dopamines are the most catchy band since Green Day and Jawbreaker, and they pack a hell of a harder punch. They're like Pinhead Gunpowder in that sense, I suppose. Although, they're more readily compared to The Copyrights and Minneapolis punk in general when it comes to their style. The point is they're beautiful and I love them. 

"Douglas Bubbletrousers" is awesome Dopamines magic through and through. There's that awesome drum fill thing Mike does that reminds me of "October 24th" from their album Expect the Worst, and there's the parts that goes, "watch my pupils freeze while I rack my knees, grind my teeth until they bleed!" which reminds me of the song "Easy Living" off their self titled full length. I mean, you can spend all day pointing out why some new song by a band sounds like something they've already put out...I mean, people do that about Green Day all day, but then you're not appreciating what's new about it. The Dopamines aren't Screeching Weasel, these songs don't all sound the same. This song is awesome and it makes me more than anything want to hear everyone of their new songs that haven't been released yet. I think they've played this song live before, also. They played a new song the last time I saw them, and I think this was it. 

The second song on their side is probably my favorite song on the entire split. "Heads Up Dusters" is slower than most Dopamines songs at parts, which only serves to create a new feeling to it. How many of their songs are about chemicals now? The last song mentioned some, this song repeats "CHEMICALLY CHEMICALLY CHEMICALLY ALTERED!" And they have that one song "The Satisfaction of a Physical Retraction From a Chemical Reaction Attraction," which is for the most part just a bunch of chemical names and what not. I guess they earned the name The Dopamines pretty fairly, after all. 

So, you're doing a great disservice to yourself and the human race by not getting yourself a copy of this split. I was at the release show for this split, but someone messed up an order and they had CDs instead of vinyls, so that was balls. You should buy a copy online, seriously It's well worth it, and it's cheap!. It's awesome. I love it. That should be enough for you savages.

-Idle

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