The Loved Ones
Keep Your Heart
Fat Wreck Chords 

With their debut full length Keep Your Heart, The Loved Ones have produced an admirable rock album that keeps its own heart in the right place. While most modern bands get caught placing emphasis on cliche lyrics, be they angry or sappy, or beating the proverbial dead horse with repetitive hooks, The Loved Ones tread the difficult middle ground between melodic and hard rock without forgetting priority #1; to entertain.

Besides one minor misstep, all the tracks on Keep Your Heart are entertaining, fast, and fun, clocking in at 3 minutes or less and steering clear of any unnecessary piano interludes or away-message-worthy one liners. This is what most pop punk bands might sound like if emo hadn’t poisoned the musical well and infiltrated every sub-genre of modern ‘punk’ music; it’s how it used to sound when Fat Wreck still ruled the world and bands like No Use for a Name and Lagwagon were at the top of their game. Keep Your Heart is littered with tracks that draw intelligently and creatively from this golden era in fast, melodic punk history.

If you added horns to ‘Hurry Up and Wait’ or ‘Living Will’ you’d have two of the best songs Less Than Jake never recorded. The guitar heavy second track, ‘Breathe In’, recalls the darker tones of NUFAN’s earlier work. The next track, ‘Jane’, is the first song on the record to play with an abundantly catchy vocal melody but, to the Loved Ones’ credit, it never manages to push itself into annoying Sugarcult territory; an impressive feat.

The album’s only misstep, which I mentioned earlier, comes in the seventh track ‘Sickening’, which is Keep Your Heart’s obligatory ’slow song’. The track lacks the pulse and energy that makes the Loved Ones’ formula work. One positive note about the song, however, is the lack of piano, which has recently become a staple of the obligatory slow song. Its exclusion is enough to forgive the short comings of the track. Much kudos to the Loved Ones for exhibiting this intelligent restraint, not only on ‘Sickening’ but throughout the entirety of Keep Your Heart.

If you are, to put it nicely, wholly disgusted by whats being passed off as the ‘new hot band’ in the pop punk world these days than you may benefit from a few listens to The Loved Ones. They will remind you that it is still possible to make fast, fun music that isn’t crippled by a 2-month trend expiration date. Although I admittedly haven’t been paying too close attention to Fat Wreck Chord’s recent releases, Keep Your Heart is the first release in a great while that has brought me as much entertainment as the albums issued in the golden days of the label. It is hard not to get excited over this one. As a tired and aching fan of pop punk, I recommend it highly.

MP3
Jane
Suture Self 

Websites
The Loved Ones official website