Local Reviews: The Hung Ups

The Hung Ups
Red Rocket
Self-released
Street: 12.15.09
The Hung Ups = Screeching Weasel + The Mooks
Dripping sexual frustration as teenage pop-punk is prone to do, there’s no more to Red Rocket than twelve songs about girlfriends, pizza and alcoholism. The songs blast through with such haphazard high energy that they are almost indistinguishable.  J Hole, the lead singer and guitarist, tries awfully hard to make his voice sound trashed and gravelly, throwing flat what would otherwise be decent melodies. The guitar parts are sometimes catchy and sometimes grinding (unbearably so in “Stuttering Stanley”) and they are, more often than not, super-reminiscent of mid/late 90s pop-punk standards. The intro of “Anywhere with You” is suspiciously similar to Blink 182’s “Wendy Clear,” and “The Age of Minimum Wage” sounds so much like “Punk Rawk Show” by MxPx that it’s alarming. Unimaginative unpleasantness aside, I dig “The Bowling Song” for its juvenile simplicity and the line repeated over and over, “I’m gonna get drunk and go bowling.”