 |
| Album Rating: B |
Allow me to preface this review by saying that I am falling
out of love with the younger, more accessible side of the pop punk
spectrum. Perhaps my inability to
connect with the usual, humorless lyrical themes (girls, personal
relationships, hating town, etc.) is what repels me from the genre and a lot of
its popular acts (The Story So Far, Man Overboard, and Handguns, to name a
few), or maybe the sheer redundancy of pop punk is finally getting to me. That being said, Providence, RI’s Hampshire
proves that there are still bands of the sort that are capable of catching my
attention. Hampshire’s debut full-band
EP,
Ocean State Stories, revives the
sound from pop punk’s glory days in the late 90s and early 2000s, paying homage
to all of the right influences.
