When people dismissively ask “You still listen to punk music?,” they are actually thinking of bands like the four-piece Bad Luck. This group from Long Island and Daytona Beach, represent all that made the genre such a muddled mess of mediocrity in the early aughts. Pop music and seventh grade poetry masquerading as “Emo” all got mislabeled with the Punk tag, perverting a genre that was doing just fine without all the unwanted attention.
This 10-song Cold Bones, would have fit in perfectly on the 2002 Warped Tour. The band checks off just about every box on the cliché list (snarled vocals? Check; Acoustic ballad? Check; Duo vocals with one dude screaming? Check). If this record had come out a decade ago it likely would have been all over Fuse and TRL and the band’s t-shirts would have made it to the window at Hot Topic. But, it’s 2014 and the world has finally (thankfully) moved on.
Bad Luck – Cold Bones/CD/10 tracks/Tragic Hero/2014