Banner Pilot – Resignation Day

The other day I was riding the bus home from school and it suddenly dawned on me: the year is actually almost over. There was only three more months left in the year; while that’s still a fair amount of time, it would be safe to say the main portion of the year had come and gone. So I decided to see if I could pick out 10 CDs that would make my top ten list if I had to pick one right away. I instantly picked out a few EPs but had a hard time finding ten full lengths to make the list. A few CDs immediately jumped to mind but I was nowhere near to a full ten. The next day I heard Banner Pilot‘s Resignation Day and while I can’t confirm it for sure, chances are they’ve just taken one of those allotted ten spots.

For you see, Banner Pilot‘s deliciously distorted blend of punk is the perfect blend of punk for me. No, its not breaking boundaries or changing lives and yes, some songs do sound somewhat similar to one another; but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Resignation Day plays through the way an album should play through – with rough, raw, and scratchy pop-punk songs and not a minute’s rest.

The band’s sounds fits nicely in the punk rock underground, amidst former legends, current legends and soon to be legends. By that I mean Jawbreaker, Dillinger Four and Lawrence Arms – yes, that’s the tastiest buffet of rough-edged pop-punk I’ve ever soon too. The songs are laced with worn out vocals, destroyed by years of alcohol and cigarettes just like Blake Schwarzenbach and Brendan Kelly. They reek with passion and sincerity and pull at you throughout the sometimes muffled delivery. Musically, they take the speed of Asian Man era Larry Arms and slam it with the distinctive sound of everyone’s cult favoritesDillinger Four. Hell, they even throw in a little sound byte over a simple riff in the middle of Wired Wrong (a song which stands out every time alongside Absentee) which sounds like the sound clip ofTour Song or anything from Midwestern Songs of The Americas.

Lyrically, Banner Pilot hit it right on too. The lyrics are personal and sincere, direct enough to be easily understood but abnormally vague at the same time to allow them to be interpreted in various ways. They tell a story in a roundabout way and are seeping in passion, hopefulness, self-deprecation and depression. All of these are what I think of when I think of Blake Schwarzenbach and his lyrics are incomparable.Banner Pilot, however, comes damn close. See Saltash Luck, Absentee, or Baltimore Knot to see what I mean.

Listen to the bass-heavy Absentee. Get pulled in during the chorus of the mid-tempo Wired Wrong. Hear the three chord intro to No Transfer or the back and forth chorus of Shell Game and you’ll be sold. The songs are rough and gruff but still tinged with an unmistakable sense of harmony and melody. So yeah, when it comes to the end of the year, I’m sure I’ll have one less spot to fill on my top ten list.