New Found Glory – Sticks And Stones

New Found Glory’s latest release (06/11/2002) Sticks And Stones is another excellent cd released by the group. This pop-punk band delivers you an 12 song cd, but that is only the beginning. NFG has given many little extras in this album. The first thing you come upon once you’ve opened the cd is a New Found Glory sticker for you to add to your collection. You pop the cd into your cd player and listen to the cd, once your done, you take it out to put it back into the case, but you notice the little Enhance CD logo. So you decided to head over to your computer and pop the cd into the hard drive. You navigate your self the bands home page (http://newfoundglory.com) and see the pop up telling you to click the button and see some special behind the scenes stuff of NFG. It seems pretty easy, all you have to do is sign up for the mailing list and you get to see some cool video. Unfortunately, its not as easy as that. To get to see the videos you have to get some huge security thing through Microsoft. And this isn’t a quick process as they make it look like, It takes time. I waited for around 30 minutes (while doing other stuff) and it still wasn’t done!! I just cancelled it to try another day. So you have to be patient to get to finally watch the videos.

At the end of The Story So Far there is a lot of blank air, 26:36 is how long that one song is supposed to be. Now that’s not right! But its not all dead air, if you fast forward to the last 1:30 of the song, you hear the band talking and messing around singing a strange song. Also, supposedly, if you were lucky enough to receive this album some where in the United Kingdom you get to hear 3 bonus songs!

Sticks And Stones has many spectacular songs for you to listen. Some of my favorites are: My Friends Over You, Something I Can Personailty, Head On Collision, Its Been A Summer, Forget My Name, The Great Houdini and The Stroy So Far. They open up with a great song calledUnderstatement. The song starts off with a heavy drum beat and then soon goes into the song with a amazing beat throught the entire song. Around 2:20 into the song, they start saying the chorus slower with a new tune and more power it seems. Its about someone that is always following orders and listening to someone and he/she has finally had enough.

The next song is their first single from the album, My Friends Over You. This is about someone whos found the perfect girlfriend, but is still loyal to his old friends. They then go through songs like Sonny, Something I Call Personality, Head On Collision, Its Been A Summer and Forget My Name.Something I Call Personality features Blink 182’s Mark Hoppus on Bass with NFG (and Blink 182)’s manager, Chris Georggin, Bane and What Feeds The Fire on backup vocals. Forget My Name starts off with some very interesting lyrics, “Tell All My Friends That I’m Dead“. That gets your interest right away and it continues to be an excellent song.

They finish of the 2nd half of the CD with the songs: Never Give Up, The Great Houdini, Singled Out, Belated (which starts off with a completely different sound then the rest of the album) and The Story So Far. I could deep into the songs, but they are all very good and I suggest you go down to your local record store and pick up Sticks And Stones.