The Sidekicks – Awkward Breeds

I’ll never be able to scrub MGMT’s Oracular Spectacular from my mind entirely, and I suspect I’m not that album’s only permanent victim. As such the boldness of The Sidekicks’ Awkward Breeds, which begins with a sound clip similar to that of “Kids,” can’t be overstated. This is a gem of a sophomore-with-honors album such as Red Scare is becoming known for, and a powerful showing for a band carving out miles of new territory.

“DMT” introduces a string of pop-punk victories held together by steady, driving beats that, say what one will of the early-90s infrastructure, have just as much in common with the kind of rich, playful rock sound that took echo the Black Keys’ strongest early moments. Aside from that the two groups are of different lyrical species and most of this album is rumination on mortality and mildly allegorical renderings of girl problems that call on a mid-career Say Anything.

The brakes come down in the delicate “1940s Jet Fighter,” that pouts like Brand New at their most pop, before settling into a strong rhythm that crescendos back to the heights akin to the album’s best, “Incandescent Days.” The recurrent use of the sounds of children doesn’t show up often enough to establish a strong theme to the album, but its tonal cohesion gives it strength beyond its subject matter.

Rumor has it this band has been performing together since high school and each track’s careful unity is emblematic of this bond. Singer Steve Ciolek’s style puts him in a context leading from Smoking Popesback to Weezer, with a focus on subject matter plainly referential to the latter but often wholly of its own, assembled with a straight rock sensibility that is the album’s lasting impact. “1940’s Fighter Jet” and ”Looker” both push Ciolek’s voice slightly beyond the register it was meant to inhabit, but on neither track does Sidekicks lose focus of its core strengths.

Awkward Breeds is anything but. It’s a strong, confident offering in a strain of punk that has  done very well over the past couple of years and has reinvigorated a genre often populated by pop bands going punk, not vice versa. The Sidekicks have laid the foundations of an exciting concept and with a little studio time could produce the next Giant Orange.