Something happened to you the other day – you got old. It happened so subtly. Step by step, you relocated to the bar at the back of the show, you barely pump your fist anymore and you wish the damn headliner would come on already. It’s almost 10:30pm for God’s sake!
No ones blaming you. You would be an idiot to throw down in the pit, on a weeknight, with work in the morning. However, this doesn’t mean you don’t deserve some new tunes on your commute, that make you sing at the top of your lungs, the way punk used to… even if your car windows are rolled up these days
Thankfully you don’t have to rely on your crusty, old CD book as your only source for anthemic, hook infected choruses anymore. Prince Edward Island’s Little Cities have tapped into their collective nostalgia mine to crank out a debut EP, well worthy of sitting on the shelf next to many pop-punk classics. Welcome back everybody, to Friend’s Floors.
I say welcome back, because we have been here before, but not this well done and not for a long time. Picture late nineties polish from bands like Yellowcard and The Starting Line. Next, remove all the verses where the singer whines about girls that don’t like them (which, let’s face it, get harder and harder to listen to as time grinds on) then, keep in all the factors that make this genre what it is at its best – catchy, fast and hopeful.
Sure, there are some songs about girls on here, like the EP’s closer “The Girl Next Door”. This song introduces you to a women the singer is clearly intrigued by, but it doesn’t feel juvenile or desperately soulbroken, the way Emo took things in the early 2000’s. No ones heart is bleeding out on a lyric sheet here. These guys are just trying to squeeze in a few more whoa-oh-oh’s before the chorus.
This EP is fun as shit. It accomplishes this the same way your best road tripping friend or bar hopping buddy does: it doesn’t take itself too seriously and makes the best out of every opportunity. Palm-muting, break downs, chunky riffs and sing alongs that sound like they packed all of their friends into the studio.
Each of the six songs are beautifully produced by Paper Lions guitarist, Colin Buchanan. Matt Hannah, who plays guitar and sings with Little Cities, says he was a little apprehensive when Colin came on as producer.
“Their (Paper Lions) last album was really 80’s pop inspired and we were coming in, driven by albums like Take Off Your Pants and Jacket, so we weren’t sure how things were going to go . But, after just one sit down with Colin, he showed he understood the sound we were aiming for. We got right to work on the first batch of songs and he has been awesome to record with from day one. We are really happy with how the final tracks turned out.”
They should be. These songs sound amazing. Crisp guitars piled atop of energetic keyboard and bass melodies, vocal harmonies being thrown back and forth like Taking Back Sunday or Set Your Goals at their best, with punchy drums perfectly punctuating every verse chorus and bridge. If you compare any track of Friend’s Floors to the bands first, self produced single, “Longshot”, you can see how fast they figured out their strengths and how good Buchanan is at shining a light on them.
Hannah nails it when he describes why Little Cities works as well as it does.
“We all leave our wives or long term girlfriends and go work on our other relationship, our boyfriends – the band. We all really give a shit about this band.”
You can tell. The EP’s strongest attributes are most apparent on the title track “Friend’s Floors” and it’s first single – “First Impressions”. Both of these songs are great at dredging up memory tainted feelings from your long… long, past youth. They do it in a way that adds a coat of veneer to remembering what it is like to feel and care about the themes tucked into these two minutes pop songs. Little Cities don’t make you want to be young again, but they are surprisingly adept at making you think being young was fun. Was it? Who knows. Memories aren’t to be trusted. Just crank up the volume and keep driving the speed limit.
This does not sound like a debut. It makes sense though, these guys have been playing together for years, even though the band only formed in early 2017. Chris Barrett (bass), Ryan Gallant (drums) and Matt Hannah (guitar) were in a pop-punk cover band, tipping their hats to the likes of Blink, Greenday and My Chemical Romance, playing bars downtown. Mitch Gallant (guitar) and Josh Pitre (keys) were in another band playing mostly original material, but cut from the same cloth. In case you have never been to the Maritimes, Prince Edward Island is small. It was inevitable that these five guys would crash into each other after one of their respective sets. Prince Edward Island also charges you almost 100 bucks to cross the bridge every time you leave and come back, so they were kind of stuck with each other – this proved to be the perfect scenario for incubating a fast forming chemistry that will make even you, the aging punker, want to pump your fist again. These five guys were surrounded by saltwater and similar influences and given the time and space to let all this evolve into an incredibly tight six track, first offering.
So – with their sound tirelessly curated from the dusty halls of our runaway youth, Little Cities is ready to get off the island and get on a bill in your hometown. By the time they are done their set, who knows, maybe they will have pulled you away from the bar and back into the frontlines, where we all used to have the best time.
Punk’s not dead. It just has work in the morning… and lives in a little city – Charlottetown.