Night Birds, Born to Die in Suburbia, 2013

First Album Review Here in a While

How do you like your punk? It comes in so many forms that the term "punk" itself is kind of hard to pin down.

I'm not an authority on the genre(s). I came pretty late, after all, to the whole punk thing. Other than some Clash or Ramones, I was pretty much a classic rock kid who didn't pay much attention to what was happening in hardcore during the 1980s. But I've got a sense of what I like now.

Night Birds, a mostly New Jersey-bred and New Jersey-based hardcore quartet, produce a strain of punk on Born to Die in Suburbia that mixes the ferocity of 1980s Southern California with the wiseass attitude of the Jersey 'burbs. They round out their sound with some surf-type guitar and give the record a sense of place that screams "Jersey Shore" (the place where I grew up, not the reality TV show, obviously).

The album opens with the instrumental track "Escape from New York" and transitions seamlessly into the title track. It's an interesting pairing to me. While I wasn't born here, I got here when my parents left Brooklyn for the suburbs when I was five, and here I still am.

Born to Die in Suburbia has its share of less-than-two-minute hardcore burners like standouts "Modern Morons," "Pretty Poison," and "Villa Obscura;" but the record really shines when the band opens up and, sometimes, even slows things down a bit on three-plus minute tracks like "Nazi Gold" (includes piano!), "Maimed for the Masses," and "Less the Merrier" along with the album's second instrumental, the heavily surf-infused "Silver Alert."

I feel like hardcore punk has always been a suburban thing. Born to Die in Suburbia takes West Coast suburban aggression and melds it with East Coast suburban attitude and comes up with something I'm not sure I would have appreciated in my teens. With a few decades of life in the Jersey 'burbs under my belt, though, Born to Die in Suburbia hits me right where I live. Literally.

Born to Die in Suburbia is out now on Grave Mistake Records. You can stream / buy the album over at Night Birds' Bandcamp page.