New Found Glory - Coming Home

The latest from New Found Glory is a really good album; it's impeccably produced and their sound is incredibly clean and well-defined. But I can't get into it. Simply put, this album is not for me, nor do I think it's directed toward me.

What's the problem? I just can't buy into this sound. It's watered down melodic hardcore with a hint of pop punk, swirled up into saccharine-sweet love songs with melodramatic lyrics that seemed to be aimed at 14-year-old girls. This doesn't make it bad, it just leaves it with a minimal amount of edge, and places NFG in a league with the current crop of emopop punk bands like Angels and Airwaves.

Musically, most of the album is great. The guitars are full, and the riffs are incredible. Tracks like "Hold My Hand" and "Coming Home" lay down some hardcore riffs that are thick enough to bust a bottle on, and the hooks are snappy enough to get you tapping your foot and nodding no matter what you want to do. It never really breaks out into serious rock though. Instead, the music often seems restrained, like the band is playing it safe.

The lyrics are a bit melodramatic, but so is the music, so they work. On "Hold My Hand," the line "you smell like how angels oughta smell" has to be one of the best love song lines I've heard in a while, and I can picture that being a pick up line for punk teenagers for a while to come.

I do have a problem with the lyrics in the liner notes, which list a line in "It's Not Your Fault" as being "a sense of heat that I couldn't bare to touch." I don't know if that's meant to be a play on words, but I doubt it, and you'd think that Geffen Records would hire a proofreader for the liner notes.

Coming Home is definitely a great album, and I'll be surprised if it doesn't garner New Found Glory extensive sales, radio play and awards, but it's also an album that is incredibly lush in volume while remaining light on actual substance. It's syrup rather than meat. With this album, the guys New Found Glory are climbing their way up the ladder reserved for the punk version of boy bands, and while there will always be a place for them, it will be as "gateway bands" to guide kids into harder punk rock.