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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
few modern punk bands can beat em, even now, October 11, 2000
A lot of people worried when the Utters became a Fat Records bands 5 years ago. Well, just goes to show that a band can overcome a record label if they're good enough. And this is one more entry in the Utters' amazing catalog of albums. Whereas Juvenile Product was their splashy entry into indie-punk stardom, and 5 Lessons Learned sorta looked inward and came off as a darker, more Social D'ish mature effort, this is an exploration of further territory than has normally been covered on Utters' records.If you bought the Brazen Head ep, you were treated to a short, but unbelievably quality-filled assortment of great tunes. They ranged from the recently derived acoustic stuff, to the classic punk stompers, to uptempo and poppier moments. It was all Utters, but it was more diverse than their previous efforts. This self-titled cd is an extension of that. They break a little further from the typical street-punk mold and come off with a variety of great tunes that stand up to repeated listening. The Utters have always done 2 things well. #1 They have a superior grasp on melody and tunefulness, in a genre where this often gets left behind for grunting and beer-soaked choruses. From their early mid-tempo stuff, to their harder NRA years, to the refined Fat era, they never lost sight of the SONG that needs to be there in any musical endeavor. #2 Bonnel/Koski have a superior knack for poetic, non-cliched, non-emo but still personal lyrics. They don't overdo it with sappy sentiment, instead preferring to tread the line of poetry delivered with an honest straight face that lets you decide the meaning. Top-notch songwriting! And since countless bands have ripped them off since the Utters started early last decade, you would think that they would have been buried under a barrage of clones. Very much the opposite. With every limp talentless "street-punk" band that rears its ugly safety-pinned head, it gets more and more obvious that the Utters are doing something special, something with a lot more meaning than your average punk band. Fat Records has the MP3 of the first song on this CD on their website, so feel free to listen to it in its entirety. And thankfully, the Utters have included their TKO hit Teen Idol Eyes on this album, which is great for fans who might not have turntables. I won't go so far as to say this is the Utters' London Calling, but it really seems like it. A sort of creative plateau that reaches and succeeds at grasping a variety of styles without seeming forced. Let's face it, the Swingin Utters could have gone on making anonymous-sounding "street-punk" records for an eternity, and people would have been satisfied enough with that. Let's be glad they didn't.
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~ Swingin' Utters
~ Swingin' Utters
~ Swingin' Utters
~ Swingin' Utters
~ Swingin' Utters
by Swingin' Utters 
