New Found Glory - Not Without A Fight

New Found Glory
Not With­out A Fight
Epi­taph; 2009

There’s some­thing to be said for con­sis­tency. For every band that seeks to explore the edges of its sound on every sin­gle record they release, there’s another that is more than com­fort­able stay­ing inside the small styl­is­tic cor­ral it’s cre­ated. There are plenty of rea­sons to engage in some exper­i­men­ta­tion, because no one wants to hear the same songs across three straight albums, but a group will always run the risk of alien­at­ing fans by not hav­ing a cen­ter to its sound. When an act remains within a highly defined set of bound­aries, it’s true that crit­ics and naysay­ers can quickly and neg­a­tively pigeon­hole its sound, but when done prop­erly, fans typ­i­cally respond favor­ably to a famil­iar, unswerv­ing musi­cal for­mula.

Thus, there is a rea­son that a band like New Found Glory have con­sis­tently sold well and toured well over the course of its career – fans know exactly what to expect from NFG’s music and they remain loyal because of this. On Not With­out A Fight, the band’s first record since sign­ing with Epi­taph, the rec­og­niz­able ele­ments of con­tem­po­rary pop-​punk are all present and in copi­ous quan­ti­ties. Big gui­tars dom­i­nate the mix, the lyrics are all about girls (whether about rela­tion­ships or breakups), instantly catchy hooks that would make a fish­er­man jeal­ous, and the clear tenor vocals (with har­monies!) that serve as the real call­ing card of this eas­ily digestible ver­sion of punk.

This is the def­i­n­i­tion of Hot Topic Punk, and you can merely read through the song titles to learn exactly what’s going to come out of the speak­ers. Not With­out A Fight starts off strong with “Right Where We Left Off,” “Don’t Let Her Put You Down,” and “Lis­ten To Your Friends,” but by the time we get to the sec­ond half of the record, snooz­ers like “Rea­sons,” “Heart­less At Best,” and “This Isn’t You” rule the day and make you want to reach for the skip but­ton on your stereo. More­over, rock pro­duc­tion val­ues are in play here (mixed in with occa­sional hard­core pre­ten­sions), but things just sound a too damn pretty and clean to be actual punk music.

It’s a wholly aver­age record, filled with pop-​punk fun­da­men­tals, but col­lected in a very typ­i­cal man­ner. We’ve heard all of this before, but maybe this exactly what the fans of New Found Glory want from the band. Maybe I’m the one who doesn’t get it, but if so, I’m OK with that. Per­son­ally, I would pre­fer for the band to seek out a newer, fresher sound with its move to a new record label – dirty up the sound a bit, find some­thing other than girls to pine over in the songs. Ulti­mately, if I were to haz­ard a hypoth­e­sis, the uni­for­mity of style on Not With­out A Fight prob­a­bly won’t win the band any new admir­ers, but it will prob­a­bly make the old ones quite happy.