Day 84: Four Year Strong – Enemy of the World

Pop-punk is a genre that I love and hate more simultaneously than almost any other. On one hand, it ignites a raging nostalgia in me, bringing me back to driving around and around in my neighborhood in my first car before I had my driver’s license, air coursing through the open windows, blasting Josie (which I still insist is one of the best songs ever written) and feeling awesome. So you get the right power chords together with the right vocals and it makes me smile irrepressibly.

Four Year Strong succeed at that. The group, the second best thing to hail from Worcester, Massachusetts (after the sauce), had two previous full-lengths and an album of covers. I haven’t heard either of the LPs, but I’ve also spent a little time tonight listening to the covers album, and I must say I like these guys. They have that inarticulable quality or combination of qualities: they obviously enjoy their music for its own sake, they are not posturing, they are creative, to excessively emphasize the first point they seem to be having a great time — all of these things combine into refreshingly entertaining, good-spirited pop punk that uplifts and satisfies.

Thankfully, Four Year Strong seem to respect the genre, and rather than continuously re-releasing New Found Glory songs anymore or at all for that matter, and try to expand on the style they’ve committed to. They fold more aggressive, post-hardcore guitars, double bass drum, breakdowns, and riled-up gang vocals, but never seem like they’re trying to come off as hardcore per se. There are choruses aplenty here that encourage the listeners to stand strong, to be themselves, etc. While most bands that bandy that kind of us-and-themism about come off as conceited, self-appointed vanguards of their sacred tenets, Four Year Strong instead captures with their music an infectious, all-inclusive sense of purpose. What’s their purpose? It doesn’t matter.