The Wonder Years’ – Get Stoked On It!

  • Bobby Gorman posted
  • Reviews

The Wonder Years

Get Stoked On It! - No Sleep Records

“Picture HelloGoodbye, Set Your Goals, Motion City Soundtrack, Saves The Day and New Found Glory getting Zolof The Rock and Roll Destroyer pregnant.” That’s how The Wonder Years‘ bio describes their music, and before I heard anything by them I was excited. I mean, I love New Found Glory and am rather found of most of the other bands listed, if they could pull it off, I would be stoked.

And stoked I was. Get Stoked On It! blasts through the starting gate with the energetic Keystoke State Dude Core sounding enough like Set Your Goals that I felt like I’d found a CD I could throw in and enjoy anytime. Just like they predicted, they uncompromisingly merged hardcore beats with pop-punk melodies with a dash of keyboards thrown in too like Patent Pending and Farewell. There’s a youthful vibe throughout propelled by the laughingly immature lyrics about the Kool-aid man, becoming astronauts, pirates going to the prom and “moshercising” and while they aren’t anything that will stick with you for a long time, the lyrics are still mindlessly entertaining. Vocally, they are a mix of Jordan Brown and Jordan Pudnik, leaning more towards the former than the latter and the occasional use of gang vocals help diversify the sound every once in a while too.

So I was sufficiently stoked as there was enough enjoyable aspects scattered throughout Get Stoked On It! to keep the record spinning for it’s full length. Yeah, some songs did sound frighteningly familiar to one another but it didn’t become overly annoying like on many releases and at the end of my first listen I enjoyed it. I clicked repeat to listen to it again, this time I wasn’t as stoked on it.

Nothing was really different – how could it be? It’s the exact same CD. However, I could never get into it again as much as I did that first listen. It’s just that little things started to bother me, most notably: the keyboards. They soon become oddly irritating and really affected my listening pleasure. Far too prominent, I soon noticed how much the keyboards were trying to invade the songs like When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong and Zombies Are The New Black and take them to a more digitalized sound. Too high pitched, the keyboards didn’t fit in with the either the hardcore elements or the pop-punk elements of their sound and I continually wished they would be taken out.

Soon after, the repetitiveness of the album also kicked in and the album became harder to listen to front to back. A few songs continually stuck out like Buzz Aldrin: The Poster Boy For Second Place, I Feel In Love With A Ninja Master and My Geraldine Lies Over The Delaware, but the others fell into the background and I no longer had the patience to sit through the record again.

Enough semblances to many bands that I continually enjoy make it nearly impossible for me to completely knock aside The Wonder Years, but I don’t see me listening to it much more in the future either. Maybe I just over played it, but as I sit typing this I’m just waiting for the record to end so I can put on a better release and I can’t help but think that I’d rather stick with Set Your Goals and Daggermouth if I want my fix of pop-core.