Labels: Mangrove
Review by: Andy Malcolm
More Japanese punk rock fun here, and it’s not on Snuffy Smile shock horror!
Cradle to Grave are well on the road to being one of the best punk rock bands going. Take a healthy Dillinger Four influence and blend in all your favourite Japanese pop punk supplements from bands like Blew, the Urchin and so on. The resulting pudding that you receive is Cradle to Grave and they come up with bouncy rockers like “No Future, No Cry”, replete with handclaps, and gang “YEAH!” chants. But hold your horses for “American Hero”, which is extravagantly good. Guitars gallop, singers yell, and your foot taps madly up and down. Scuffed up, raw, free-wheeling, yet melodic and damn fine! And it has that fast chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga guitar thing that D4 do. This band needs to come to the UK.
Eat to the Full are not quite in the same league, but still wanna play driving melodic punk rock. The shoutily sung vocals are brilliant and the music is catchy and played pretty fast. You’ll be playing air drums to “Something”. They also have a Blew influence. “I Standing Here” is much slower, and not quite so great, but never mind. Has more emo-ey parts and guitar solos a la Lovemen.
Tuneful Japanese punk rock, you just can’t go wrong with it.