New Brains for Everyone

Chicago hardcore punks the Brokedowns spent three years lying low before writing and recording their third album, New Brains for Everyone, but they didn't break up: that time was spent rehearsing and playing small-scale live gigs around various Illinois suburbs, woodshedding to incorporate the two very different strains in their music. Guitarist Kris Megyery and bassist Jon Balun split songwriting and vocal duties in the Brokedowns, and they have radically opposed styles: Balun's songs, while not quite pop-punk in the Green Day tradition, are firmly rooted in the likes of the Buzzcocks, Screeching Weasel and other bands who mix a good dose of melody in with their rabble-rousing, while Megyery's spiky hardcore has more in common with the bands who looked to Black Flag as their primary inspiration. New Brains for Everyone does a surprisingly good job of balancing those contradictory impulses, and the results strongly recall a long-ago classic of Chicago punk rock, Naked Raygun's Throb Throb. Like that 1985 winner, New Brains for Everyone splits the difference between thudding hardcore blasts like "Pro-Gear, Pro-Attitude, Pro-Results" or "Who Stabbed Sean Spencer?" and more overtly melodic, poppier tunes like "Year of the Hydra," largely by adding just enough elements of each style to all the songs to make them sound properly cohesive. Smart, passionate and appealing, New Brains for Everyone is everything a hardcore album should be.