Victory Kid – Discernation

The press release for this album rats out the Victory Kid crew as seasoned musicians with an impressive portfolio of session work, as if that matters. It doesn’t need to. You can tell from the first spin that these guys know their shit. It’s in the gleeful skipping from one flavour to another from a smorgasbord of emo-tinged skate punk, ska, pop and rock. It’s in the utterly brilliant musicality of every track. It’s in the fantastic songcraft and production. Discernation really is the album that you wish your favourite band from all those genres had managed to make.

Where do you begin with such an embarrassment of riches? Blank Space is classic punk pop that careers through every cliché of the genre: the guitars chug and crash, it’s a glorious sing-a-long, rabble-rousing four and a half minutes of glory. The creepy clown phenomenon gets the full ska punk treatment in Clownin and the style reappears in Morning Wood, which is a hymn to the joys and perils of the unexpected early stiffy.

There’s tenderness and reflection too. Doobs and Flying Through The Cosmos are thoughtful and affecting guitar pop. As a counterbalance, Tuck Frump is a sharp and incisive critique of US domestic politics. Highlights, as if any track is better than any other on this magnum opus, are the aforementioned Blank Space and the gorgeous Leaving New York, which has ‘travelling montage soundtrack’ written all over it.

It is, however, invidious to select particular tracks out on merit. Discernation is simply an excellent album from start to finish with no fillers and no slavish adherence to genre conventions. The clichés are considered and carefully and playfully constructed. And that’s the key – there’s a great and knowing joy in this album that showcases a perfect understanding of how to make a great record. Too eclectic for genre nerds and the easily confused? Possibly. Too good to ignore? Most definitely. And if Westlife happen to be reading, there’s a key change in Tuck Frump. Check it out.

Discernation by Victory Kid is out now on SBÄM Records and Lockjaw Records