The Swellers – My Everest

The instant My Everest, the debut full length from Michigan’s The Swellers, starts, the band’s influences come through. You hear a great throw back to the beautiful skate punk phase of the mid nineties and are flooded with images of the great melodic punk bands of the era. I’m talking No Use For A Name, Lagwagon and Pulley, the bands who defined the genre and are still kicking around re-inventing it.

Now, The Swellers are adding a new depth to the style. Fast drumming, melodic vocals that consistently remind me of Tony Sly (with the occasional Nuno Pereira’s style thrown in too) and guitar work that would fit into any Fat Wreck release of the mid nineties, My Everest is an impressive collection of punk rock tunes. The musicianship is outstanding, particularly for such a young band. The Flood starts out softly with an acoustic guitar before breaking into a fast paced anthem whose guitar work sounds like A Wilhelm Scream alongside more melodic vocals. Surrounded is a rawer song that just screams outNUFAN while songs like Conscience Meet Common Sense and Clean Slate are just straight forward skate punk tracks.

It makes for a record that is incredibly enjoyable, energetic and rejuvenating. My Everest ignores the trends and comes out as one of the more invigorating skate punk records in a while. However, it does fall victim to a very limited span of diversity. The songs are, albeit always entertaining, sometimes far too similar to one another. This creates a record that is immensely enjoyable to be played but also very forgettable.

Being so forgettable, My Everest isn’t a CD you’ll go out of your way to play but it’s still a CD you’ll remember loving. The instant someone mentions their name or you read something about them online, your mind will click and you’ll go “hey, that was a damn good CD,I should listen to it;” and so you will. You’ll pull it out, enjoy it, praise it and then move on to something new until someone mentions them again and you have that urge to replay it.

So while it won’t leave a gigantic impression on you, there’s so many great elements in My Everest that it will leave a subliminal imprint in your mind; and even though I may not listen to this a hundred times over the next year, I’m quite interested to see what they’ll come out with next. Because if it’s anything like this one, I’ll be sure to have a blast playing it.