This was a project that was announced shortly before Corona shut the world down, and it\u2019s nice to see the album coming out on time. Formed by members of D.C. punk bands, including Brian Baker of Bad Religion\/Minor Threat and Johnny Temple of Girls Against Boys teaming up with Dennis Lyxzen of Refused on vocals, Fake Names isn\u2019t exactly hardcore and they\u2019re not exactly pop punk either. On the opening track, \u201cAll for Sale,\u201d they hit a nice middle ground of alt rock and pure punk without a lot of speed and intensity but a good range of melody. It\u2019s as if they took all the elements of their other bands, all that diversity and rage and watered it down into a watery stew. \u201cBeing Them\u201d is very midtempo and Lyxzen\u2019s vocals are good, but there\u2019s just not much there.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re here looking for a brand new punk supergroup playing at warp speed and loving every minute of it, then Fake Names ain\u2019t it and you\u2019ll be disappointed as a result. If what you\u2019re looking for is more midtempo so-so punk from a group of veterans, then you might have found exactly what you wanted. There\u2019s some good melodic stuff here, like on \u201cHeavy Feather,\u201d but other tracks like \u201cThis is Nothing\u201d just fall flat; they never really get off the ground and don\u2019t elevate to the heights previously established by these guys\u2019 other bands.<\/p>\n
Overall, this just comes across as a bunch of friends teaming up to make a record without any real expectations from their other bands\u2019 fanbase. What you get is a disappointing disc of midtempo punk that doesn\u2019t do much for any of the musicians included. Though the final track \u201cLost Cause\u201d is decent enough, there\u2019s not enough here to really recommend. This is more of a curio to check out if you\u2019re a fan of any of these other bands. If not, then don\u2019t bother with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":34067,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[10523],"rating":[5619],"class_list":["post-45897","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-fake-names","rating-rating-c"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/45897\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=45897"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=45897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}