‘Riot Hearts Rebellion’ is both the fourth album from alleged pop-punk band Patent Pending, and a microcosm of everything wrong with alternative music in 2016. The record is a cynical mish-mash of the barest of punk rock morés and the kind of mainstream pop influences that have sent Fall Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco into orbit over the last few years, as interpreted by someone’s embarrassing dad.
Things don’t start out too badly: opener ‘Another Day’, while miles from any accusations of innovation, manages to be an attempt at an epic pop-ballad while channeling the unlikely ghost of Blur’s lo-fi masterpiece ‘Tender’. But from there the album rapidly rolls backwards down a soporific hill of frat boy humour and music so offensively inoffensive as to make All Time Low sound like Killswitch Engage.
‘Riot Hearts Rebellion’ generally occupies the awkward middle ground between a rejected 5 Seconds of Summer B-Side and, thanks to Joe Ragosta’s voice, ‘Songs From An American Movie’-era Everclear. The album’s nadir comes exactly halfway through, with ‘NSFW (.)(.)’. A song that manages the impressive feat of being even more offensive and pathetic than the parenthetical tits in its title, ‘NSFW’ would elicit sighs of disappointment if it had been written by a group of primary school children. “’Cause news moves fast but your boobs move quicker”, sings Ragosta, while the decaying corpses of dead punk musicians rotate in their graves,”a picture of dat ass on the front page of Flickr”.
That it’s the product of a group of men in their 30s makes its unforgivably awful lyrics – veering between weird victim-blaming and tee-hee, aren’t-dicks-hilarious toilet humour – somehow even more grating. So much so that ‘Started In My Head’, which repurposes the timeless ‘HERE WE/HERE WE/HERE WE FUCKING GO’ football chant as a hook, actually comes as something of a relief. It’s still fucking dreadful, mind.
Pop music is fine. In fact it’s brilliant. When it’s good. And there’s nothing wrong with bands embracing its high camp – we love Panic!’s recent ‘Death Of A Bachelor’, and own at least one Taylor Swift t-shirt. No, Patent Pending’s crime is not ‘going soft’, ‘selling out’, or even trying to branch out into the ever-growing market of pop bands who utilise buzzing guitars to identify themselves with the punk rock scene. It’s writing terrible, terrible songs with a sensibility that belongs back in the less enlightened days of frosted tips and pre-UFO Tom Delonge. Although that’s arguably an insult to frosted tips, UFOs and Tom Delonge. Diabolically bad.
ROB BARBOUR