The Manix – Neighborhood Wildlife

Minnesota pop-punk the way you’ve come to love it – with gruff vocals full of rough, poppy hooks.  That’s the Manix way.  If you were thinking Dear Landlord or Banner Pilot then you wouldn’t be far off, especially given the latter’s backing vocalist is fronting the effort.  After dropping a short EP a couple years back the trio has rewarded the patient with their formal full-length debut, the twelve-song Neighborhood Wildlife – a model of contemporary underground pop-punk that expectant reviewers await annually.

Running in at just over thirty minutes the band nails that perfect pop-punk runtime, justifying each moment with an infectious zest for life and jangly rhythms that you’ll be singing along with even on your first listen.  Complete with gravely backing support, tracks like “Where Do We Go?” climax with huge concluding choruses.  “This Old House” benefits from similar tactics since the track’s final number doubles as a sizeable album closer.  Who said pop-punk had to be sugar coated and stripped down to be catchy?  These songs are full-figured and rewardingly engaging.

And if you can resist the infectious instrumental fun for a moment, the lyrical jests will surely take hold.  For the opening on “What’s Myage Again” Corey Ayd barks rhetorically “waking up like a geriatric’s dawn, bag o’ bones and an old party, mid-twenty makes me so downtrodden, gonna go out but why? gonna go out but why?”  The band makes no effort at covering up their target audience, instead embracing the hazy journey of personal path-finding that we call early adulthood.

Six months is a damn long time, but that’s how long this thing has been living in my dashboard. Manix doesn’t necessarily do anything different than their peers – they simply do it better.  I’ve come to know the album inside out and can safely say that it’s tough to pick up another.  One of the year’s solid pop-punk standouts.