Face to Face is the Tesla of punk. Their latest, "Reactionary," is the "Mechanical Resonance" of 2000. Much as Tesla's heavy metal tended to sound painstakingly over-produced, "Reactionary" sounds equally Ÿber-crafted. You can get away with this in metal. Punk, however, is a different ordeal all together.
Like Tesla's Jeff Keith learned to do, Face to Face's front man Trever Keith needs to let his hair down and wail like a solo truck driver singing along to Led Zeppelin on some barren Nebraska interstate. As of now, Trever's delivery is strictly Bad Religion: monotone and mono-note; yet it still manages to be too darn melodious to crank. In the current sad radio-friendly blending of pop and punk - a combo as dour as mixing grape juice and Old Milwaukee - punk is taking a backseat, letting Celine Dion and Elton John do the Sunday driving.
The opening track, a harmonious failure and heartless rant entitled "Disappointed," lives up to its name and truly does disappoint. Why does modern snot-nosed, teen-targeted pop-punk have so many damn woo-hoo background vocals that are sung with melodic precision? Johnny Rotten is turning over in his grave, and he's not even fully dead yet.
What Face to Face needs to do is lock itself up in a room full of porno and vodka and put on the Sex Pistols' "Never Mind the Bollocks" and the Subhumans' "The Day The Country Died" on continuous repeat until those flawless discs full of wonderful flaws melt and meld into Face to Face's Santa Monica signed heads. Another step forward would be for Trever to lose the thesaurus. Only Carcass uses that many words straight from the verbal portion of the GRE.
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This is not to say the disc is a total loss. Amidst the bland wreckage are a few salvageable gems that just might be worth risking the bends to bring to the surface. Trever actually sounds like he means it - and isn't that what punk is about? - on "You Could've Had Everything." That song, along with "Think For Yourself," are the only tracks on the disc worth putting on a mix tape of favorites.
Like the two aforementioned songs, the best tracks are the ones that Trever wrote himself. Unfortunately, the rest of the band has a hand in nine of the 12 tracks. A Trever Keith solo project in the near future would be much respected.
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