Guitars, Drums, Tones, and Saxophones

MxPx - Secret Weapon

When you’ve been playing in a band for 15 years, and you started your career mostly singing about girls, heartbreak, longing, girls, and high school politics, there probably comes a time when you’re not as in touch with those things anymore. So what do you do? Well, one solution is to keep on churning out the attempts at songs that connect with teenagers as if you were still clued into that melodramatic life even as you’re happily married. The other is, of course, to move on, and grow with your audience.

MxPx has taken the latter route, thank goodness. They still have some sense of bucking society’s expectations of them- now as full-on adults- that is summed up in their popular single “Responsibility.” But that was some years ago; here they are, putting out an album in 2007, 15 years since they got together in 1992 to play some bratty punk rock in their Washington hometown.

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Various Artists - All Aboard: A Tribute to Johnny Cash

Now, I think we can all agree that tribute albums are hit-or-miss affairs, at best; often, the albums are terrible, and offer no compelling evidence to justify their existences. How many times have you listened to a tribute album to an artist you like and not come away thinking “I’d have rather had this as a ‘Greatest Hits’ package?” I bet it’s a handful. We’re not even going to talk about genre/era “tributes,” since more often than not those are just “hip” bands making ironic covers that they think are HI-LARIOUS. (Notable example: the late’90s Metaliska album. That shit was so good)

And it’s with that in mind that one enters into this, Anchorless Records’ (based out of Allston, MA!) tribute to Johnny Cash. They’ve assembled a punk-centric collection of artists like the Bouncing Souls, the Gaslight Anthem, Chuck Ragan (of Hot Water Music), MxPx, the Loved Ones, and others, along with local favorites gone national, the Dresden Dolls. So the talent is strong, not a bunch of rookie bands looking to make a name for themselves with an ironic cover of a classic. Remember how well that worked out for Alien Ant Farm?

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