The Young Punx: 'Mashpop and Punkstep' album review

Sometimes there's a fine line between a work of creative genius and a big old mess. Some people look at Pollock's 'splatter' paintings and see complex fractal dimensions, whilst others might look and think "that man has just sloshed a load of paint around on a canvas". No we've not been watching too much of boring BBC4, this analogy is simply a reference to the new The Young Punx album 'Mashpop and Punkstep'(*insert obligatory release date plug*) which is released today.

The album, as you might have guessed from the title, is a fusion of genres and styles. Opener 'You You You' breaks for a Cuban section, 'O Mio Babbino Caro' samples Puccini's aria of the same name (not one of his best, we may add, we are more prone to a bit of 'Vissi D'Arte Vissi D'Amore'), 'Ready For The Fight' features rapper Count Bass D, and so on and so on, with a variation in sound to pretty much every track.

So is this mash of styles a work of genius or a big old mess? The Robot Pigeon response to that question is: a bit of both.

There are certainly tracks that we absolutely adore and will repeat to death, like this:

The Young Punx 'Final Destination':

And we LOVE this:

The Young Punx 'Burn Burn Burn':

Other highlights are 'Ready For The Fight' which we've talked up previously, 'SugarCandySuperNova' which is as downtempo as it gets, 'Simple Pleasures' which fuses elements of Shampoo with Zig & Zag and McFly...in fact, there's something good to say about every track, but the album as a whole doesn't seem to gel.

The (God like) Phonat has co-produced the album, and it certainly feels like each track has been worked individually to perfection, but then no-one has worried too much about how the whole thing fits together.

We want to like it, we really, really want to like it because when it's good it's so so good, but listening to the album from beginning to end has got our head in a right old spin. A bit of hip hop here, some electro there, Cuban here, dubstep there. It's like a schizophrenic in anaphylactic shock having an epileptic fit.

If you look at each track in isolation there are indeed some beautiful fractals, but looking at the whole album overall "that band have just sloshed a load of musical genres around a cd". Then again, it's not every day you get compared to Jackson Pollock is it? Creative genius or a big old mess? We suggest you listen for yourselves and decide. After all, with so many genres covered, it's likely you'll find something you like.

Obligatory links:
The Young Punx Facebook
The Young Punx dot com