This summer has really dragged me into a stupor of late, and what could be a better cure than... AN INSANE PUNK RECORD? I'm actually rather excited, a little bit, as the laptop has this disc whirring, plus, as an optimistic kind of guy, I'm liking the album title, a lot. Anyway, as I write this I have realized something - I've become very all or nothing, I either love, or LOATHE the albums I review. Will I be changing this? Nope, just to get that out of the way. Fortunately Face To Face impressed me, to an extent, so maybe I am altering my outlook?

Opening track 'Should Anything Go Wrong' is as great an introduction as any. It's fast, rampaging bull fast, especially drums-wise. 'Circle-pit of an album'? So far so good... I can only imagine the effect of this sort of drive pumped clean into the ears of a small venue crawling with the students who'd love this...

They'd love the rest more though - Blink 182 and Zebrahead run riot through 'It's Not All About You' to 'Bombs Away'. Energetic, still very much so, intense and crushing not so much. Whatever though, pop punk still has half the mayhem genes! The attitude still shines through more frequently than you'd expect. It may be spread thin in parts, but you won't be throwing Face To Face in with All Time Low and You Me At Six anytime soon...

It has to go wrong though. I'm bored, almost disappointed. 'What You Came For' and 'I Don't Mind And You Don't Matter' are completely missing the buzz of the earlier tracks, these reek of filler, the drums don't even pound for Christ sakes! Right, it seems that those two were just an embarrassing blip... 'Stopgap' is great. However, and this is a slight annoyance, it sounds like it belongs on a whole different album. It's slower, it's heavy, it has a drum solo? Ohh I give up, what does it matter if the band delight in being so inconsistent?

Rhetoric. It matters very much. 'All For Nothing' is another Blink-thieved happy and bouncy affair, make your minds up, I'd appreciate it! Or don't... just give me another heavy, repetitive one-chord wonder, that's just swell too. It appears that my promo CD ends here... so maybe the last two songs were an utterly magical fusion of this completely disjointed album's two styles. Somehow I doubt it though, I'd wager a LOT of money that it's one of each, fifty/fifty, cointoss. Guess I lied, I'm unimpressed, sue me.

www.myspace.com/facetofacepunk