Review: This Year’s Comeback’s New Album  “Far From Fine, A Garden State Tragedy”
Title: Far From Fine, A Garden State Tragedy
Band: This Year’s Comeback
Released For: Spotify, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, CD
Reviewing: Physical Release (CD)
Released On: Jul. 13, 2018
Genre: Pop Punk
MSRP: $5.00
Copy Purchased
 
Green Day. Blink-182. Sum 41. Hate them or love them, pop punk enveloped the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s. From being in the top 100 on the radio to blaring in favorite games like “Burnout 3: Takedown,” pop punk has a nostalgic twinge that’s hard to ignore. Even today, pop-punk bands from around the world still try to capture the magic of the genre’s early soar in popularity. Enter in the pop-punk band This Year’s Comeback, with their first, full-length album “Far From Fine, A Garden State Tragedy.”
The band’s style appears to be a mixture of pop punk and early emo music. “Far From Fine, A Garden State Tragedy,” has the guitar and drum-heavy melodies of bands like early Green Day or Story of the Year, with the lyrical emo tastes of bands like The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, or late 1990s The Offspring. Despite hailing from New Jersey, they’ve toured around the Massachusetts area in the past, and their music is readily accessible to people, as they have their music available digitally, physically, or for streaming through Bandcamp or Spotify.
The album comes with eleven songs. I feel that the most energetic songs on the album, are “Caged In,” “Far From Fine,” and “If The Boot Fits, Then By All Means.” Lyrically and thematically, they all have similar styles of emo themes or overcoming some internal feeling of misplacement or loss, and all work well with each other in the album. Particularly, I found myself listening to the “Caged In,” music video. It feels like something that was made in the early 2000s but in a good way. The music video harkens back to the late 90s, when music videos played around more with story, resulting in something experimental, as a result.
If someone asked what songs from the album to throw on a Spotify playlist of pop punk, those would be the songs that feel the strongest, due to their strong presence and melodic lyrics that blend together well. None of the songs are particularly bad, but the song “Breaking Down,” on the album just didn’t fit in well melodically with the rest of the songs, which is a problem equally affected by the break-up lyrics of the song having to carry the weaker melody along on its back effectively.
Overall, the album was enjoyable to listen to and has a nice selection of pop-punk stylings by the band. If nothing else, I’d keep an eye out on the group, and see where they go from here.
Final Recommendation: Worth it at full price.