Good Ole Fashioned Pop Punk

I'm currently listening to the lastest Ergs! album, "Upstairs/Downstairs," which was put out by one of my favorite record labels, Dirtnap. I'm a big fan of this band and I really like that they take a basic formula and give it a new twist. The intersting thing about the Ergs! is that their influences are so ridiculously obvious, yet they sound completely fresh and like nothing else out there. It's sort of the same situation with the Modern Machines. In both cases, both bands give a big fat tip of the hat to Screeching Weasel, but once you get past that, you see a huge Replacements influence and in the case of the Ergs!, you sometimes see a little bit of Dinosaur Jr. It's very obvious these kids grew up on a heavy dose of 80's and 90's American indie rock, which I fully support. The Modern Machines was on my top ten of '06 and I can tell you right now that the Ergs! will be on my top ten of '07.
While on the subject of pop punk, I recently purchased the re-release of the first Riverdales album. When I bought the original version of this album, I wasn't all that into it and I can't give an honest reason for not liking it. I listened to the reissue several times since Saturday and all the songs that I thought were mediocre were all of a sudden incredible. Just to make sure it was my engineering ears playing tricks on me, I tossed on the original LP and I liked the original version even more than the reissue! It's a weird phenominon. Putting down an album because you didn't like it that much and then several years later listening to it and realizing that it's an incredible release. The songs are catchy as hell and the combination of Weasel, Vapid and Panic really shows why Screeching Weasel was an incredible band and why the Riverdales really did pick up where they left off.
I've always been a fan of pop punk and power pop, so this resurrgence of the genre has been really exciting for me. There are so many bands coming up right now playing pop punk the way it's meant to be played that it's getting difficult to keep up. Here's a quick list of bands worth checking out:
the Ergs!, Modern Machines, Dateless, Busy Signals, the Copyrights, Teenage Bottlerocket, This is My Fist, Canadian Rifle, the Unlovables, the Merkurs, the Steinways, Retarded, the Teenage Harlets, the Methadones, Chinese Telephones, the Bayonettes, the Dangerloves, Off With Their Heads... this list can go on for a very long time.
Off With Their Heads put out what could be one of the best pop punk records of this decade. "Hospitals" is extremely catchy, yet dark and depressing. I've got my fingers crossed that this band doesn't self destruct, because the two times I saw them, they were absolutely incredible. Do yourself a favor and check out this band while you still can. Good things never last.