Mall’d To Death – Can’t Make A Living

Mall’d To Death are a Minneapolis punk band.

That sentence right there should be a good enough selling point to get you to pick up their debut full length, Can’t Make A Living. It’s fast, low-end heavy and hard – just like Off With Their Heads, Banner Pilot or The Gateway District –  but Mall’d To Death aren’t just going through the motions and regurgitating a tried and true formula. Instead they’re building their own sound, pulling from the Minneapolis structure but adding so much more to it in order to create a collection of ten songs that are fast, catchy and packed with a punch to keep you playing it over and over again.

Its bass heavy yes, but the vocals are cleaner than you’d expect. They’re more melodic but with enough gruffness to keep it in tone with the low-end vibe. Unorthodox structures break through every song, eliminating the need for choruses or repeated sections. The songs play through the rotation once and end, making the ten song CD play through in just over eleven minutes, leaving the listener loudly begging for more.

The ten songs combine to become a pop-punk fan’s wet dream. The slower Hymns of J Church has a slight Fat Wreck vibe, the opening bass line of Hedge Fun sounds like Mark Hoppus’ line onBlink182’s Carousel.  Live In A Dumpster Drive uses a small chorus of “la, la, la, la”s and it’s almost as if The Vandal’s Warren Fitzergald is singing. Bomb The Defense Industry! has certain ska-punk qualities, like Edmonton’s Feast or Famine, creating a change in direction for the otherwise pop-punk oriented band that is only matched during the breakdown of Armani Needle Exchange.

Lyrically, the band is the lighter side of Off With Their Heads. There’s a sarcastic quality to their lyrics, with tongue-in-cheek references to bands and the music scene that birthed them. Nothing is better than on the anti-downloading track Young Man On A Downloading Spree, in which they sing “from DOA to RKL / DI to TSOL / He knows the letters well / But he don’t know what they spell.”

Sadly, Can’t Make A Living is a relatively small release which means not everyone who will love it may get the chance to hear it; which is disappointing because it deserves to be heard by as many people as possible.