Halfway through Beach Slang's debut album, on a song called "I Break Guitars," frontman James Alex asks a rhetorical question: "If rock and roll is dangerous, how can I feel so safe in it?" There are a couple of answers to that question. One is that rock and roll is not dangerous, not even remotely. It's entirely possible that no music is dangerous anymore, at least outside of a Gathering Of The Juggalos context. If you're not in the first 10 rows at a Hatebreed show, no music made with guitars is going to put you in any sort of physical, mental, psychological, or social danger. Any music that people still call "rock and roll" is, at the very worst, going to make you feel like the old guy at the party. In a world where we're approaching the 50th anniversary of Pete Townshend's Woodstock guitar-smashing, you can't really use a song called "I Break Guitars" to declare your own wildness. And Alex knows that, since he's been making that music for a long, long time. He joined the Pennsylvania pop-punk band Weston sometime in the early '90s, and he stayed with them until their 2001 breakup, playing reunion shows with them a few times after that breakup. In the grand history of '90s bands that blurred the line between pop-punk and emo, Weston were somewhere in the middle of the pack. I'm pretty sure I saw them at least once, though I could just as well be thinking of Midtown or Bayside.
Album Of The Week
Album Of The Week: Beach Slang The Things We Do To Find People Who Feel Like Us
