When I listened to Stickup Kid’s The Sincerest Form Of Flattery about a year ago, I wasn’t really impressed. It is by no means a bad album, but it just didn’t have anything that made me want to come back to it for repeated listens; however, the five-piece pop punk group from San Jose, Calif., recently released Nothing About Me and it clearly puts them several steps in the right direction. As previously mentioned, Stickup Kid’s debut album was nothing special, in my opinion, so I didn’t really have high expectations going into the new EP. With that being said, as soon as I started my first listen, I came to the conclusion that this was most definitely going to be an EP that I could listen to for hours on end.
The EP starts off with “Breathing.” As the vocalist shouts out, “This room is eating me alive and I can’t escape the glances from my lifeless family hanging on the walls,” I noticed that the vocals were much more powerful than they were on the full length, the guitars sounded much more crisp and the drumming had improved. Everything seems to act more like one unit and it continues to act that way throughout the entire EP. The strongest track on Nothing About Me is probably the second track, “Lighthouse,” or the epic closer, “The Weather Outside Is Weather.”
I hope that Stickup Kid maintains this sound on future releases. While they carried over some aspects from their full-length album, they also incorporated many other things which caused Nothing About Me to sound like a mix of Turnover, Citizen and Basement. Despite sounding like the aforementioned bands at times, Stickup Kid still manages to sound original on Nothing About Me and, in this day in age, that’s a bit of an achievement. If you tack on the fact that all of the material is incredible, you’re left with one of the best pop punk releases of 2012.
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