New Found Glory – From The Screen To Your Stereo Part II

New Found Glory are an immensely influential pop-punk band and while they may not have sold as many records as Blink182 or had as many hit singles as Green Day, but New Found Glory were always there right behind them, they’ve spawned a generation of pop-punk acts and brought the genre back to the mainstream one record at a time. However, over the past couple years their output has started to go downhill a bit. Catalyst had a few good songs but was far from hitting the energy of the band’s glory days and Coming Home? Well, it’s best not to talk about that little endeavor.

However, like so many bands, the summer of 2007 because a time of re-invention for the band. Severing ties with their major label and going back to Drive-Thru Records – the label that launched them into the limelight in the first place, the band decided to do what they do best: have fun.

Covering eleven songs from movies like Pretty Woman, She’s All That, Romeo & Juliet and more, New Found Glory has picked up where they left off seven years ago with the follow up to From The Screen To Your Stereo and just like they did almost a decade ago, New Found Glory has injected some energetic, pop-punk goodness into these songs. As soon as Kiss Me comes through the speakers you can instantly tell that New Found Glory are back to their old form. It’s no longer overtly polished as the songs are rawer and have a much stronger personality than anything from the band’s last two releases. Jordan Pundik’s vocals are still distinct, nasally and high, but a lot rougher like they were on New Found Glory with only a few points where they really go too high.

Songs like Iris, The King Of Wishful Thinking and Stay (I Missed You) make you remember how much fun New Found Glory are and are, of course, instantly recognizable as hit singles. Add in the mass amounts of guest appearances from Will Pugh (Cartel), Adam Lazzara (Taking Back Sunday), Lisa Loeb, Patrick Stump (Fall Out Boy), Chris Carrabba (Dashboard Confessional), Sherri DuPree-Gilbert (Eisley) and Max Bemis of Say Anything and in you’re for one wild treat from front to back.

Although, I will throw in a bit of criticism about the album as it isn’t quite as perfect as I make it out to be. For instance, Don’t You (Forget About Me) just seems out of place. This Simple Minds over from The Breakfast Club is a good song, but disrupts the flow of the album as it is much heavier than the rest of the album, almost pop-rock instead of pop-punk and just doesn’t fix into the feel of the album. Following that is an instrumental from Amelie, J’Y Suis Jamais Alle, which is a really good instrumental but fails to fulfill the listener’s hopes as it constantly builds in anticipation but never explodes with Jordan’s vocals. And finally, if you’re going to do a song from Donnie Darko, you damn well better do Mad World by Gary Jules, Tears For Fears‘s Head Over Heels just doesn’t scream out Donnie to me. Otherwise, New Found Glory are back and I can’t wait to see what they do next.