Attack! Attack! UK

Whether it's called "power pop" (as it was in the late '70s and early '80s) or "pop-punk" (as it was in the late '90s and early 2000s), the sort of rock music purveyed by the Welsh band Attack! Attack! UK (not to be confused with the Ohio-based Attack Attack) sounds the same, with its furiously strummed electric guitars, headlong bass rhythms, and pummeling drumbeats, all providing the punkish force to underlie a melodic and hook-filled, if emotionally wrought, vocal line. That vocal line is, for the most part, provided by the adenoidal Neil Starr on Attack! Attack! UK's self-titled debut album, and the lyrics, as is also typical, tend toward expressions of male romantic dissatisfaction. "Honesty didn't get me anywhere," Starr complains at the outset in "Honesty," "I know 'cause I read it in your diary." Things don't get much better in the rest of the song list, until, as the singer puts it in the final track, "Time Is Up." In between, however, the music's drive doesn't let up, either. The CD times out at just over 32 minutes, which is plenty long enough given its relentlessness, but Attack! Attack! UK display all the attributes of the style, suggesting that when they play this music in a club it must be hard for anyone to remain seated for long.