Please dear lord, let this cup pass from me. Not another ska record. Oh god, I hate ska. It wasn't really that good when the Specials and English Beat were doing it 20 years ago and it's even worse now. It's like eating the leftovers from a meal that wasn't any good in the first place. But the kids really love the whole ska-punk-pop thing today. Look at Sublime, Harvey Danger, Smash Mouth, Sugar Ray, the Offspring et al. They've cashed in on suburban teenage angst and the seemingly unbounded appetite for vanilla ska-ish metal. Maybe I'm just too old for all this. Regardless of my thoughts on the genre, Lucky Boys Confusion is a good ska-pop act in the vein of the bands above. I can see a number of the tracks on their debut, Growing Out of It, in heavy rotation on Q101 and other alterna-pop outlets. The record is competent and, though it doesn't break much new ground, it does follow a formula (equal parts punk, ska and teen angst with a dash of metal and hip-hop) that has worked so very well commercially. "LBC," "Masala" and "Of Course" are catchy, if not quite infectious, tracks.
They stand out from their shallow-end-of-the-pool competitors in that some of the tracks are actually very intelligent and well arranged. "Gwendolyn B. Sings Sin," perhaps the best track on the album, is a modern R&B/Jazz/Rock re-interpretation of the Gwendolyn Brooks poem "We Real Cool." Though it may be stretching things a bit to compare the situation of 1990's suburban kids with the despair faced by the inner city black kids that Brooks wrote about in 1960, it is, nonetheless, an intelligent and thought-provoking song. One hopes that they didn't just write the song out of some sort of misguided adolescent sense that the "we die soon" refrain sounded cool.
As their bio puts it, "The theme of growing up in modern suburbia radiates throughout." Very true. When I was a lad in suburbia, it was Poison and Motley Crue that inspired the local garage bands. Today it's the Offspring and Sublime. So I guess that you could say that LBC shows that suburban garage pop has come a long way.
The band is comprised of Kaustubh Pandav, vocals; Ryan Fergus, drums and percussion; Adam Krier, Vocals, guitar, keys, turntables, and congas; Jason Schultejann, bass; Joe Sell, Lead Guitar.
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