Review: The Gromos - Booty

artist: the gromos album: booty label: ash from sweat records released: by: eduardo moutinho I remember the first time that I watched The Gromos play… It was a few years ago, at a Golden High School battle of the bands, while I was still just starting to get into the underground music scene. I remember an energetic bunch of guys, playing somewhat unoriginal, yet well-executed pop punk. To be quite honest, I wasn’t too fond of the music, since I was still mostly about nu-metal, yet I respected their spot-on musicianship and apparent enjoyment of playing music. I didn’t quite understand what they were about. Fast forward to today, The Gromos are no more, rather, they are The Green Fuse now, a band with a totally revamped sound and an incredibly bright future ahead of them. Yet, The Gromos legacy of enthusiastic pop punk remains in most of our memories, and in this case, a nostalgic CD entitled Booty. In essence, Booty is an audio memoir of the band, containing all their popular tracks, enclosed in handsome packaging. Of course, the packaging is an Ash From Sweat staple. The CD, along with acknowledgments and a delightfully crafted treasure map (with clever crinkling and fading) are contained within a brown paper wrapper stamped with a stenciled logo and accented with twine strewn across the bottom. The music itself is just as I described earlier, energetic pop punk. There’s nothing really complicated here, just a group of high school kids living out their adolescence. This brings me back to another thing I said earlier, when I saw them at that battle of the bands, I wasn’t too keen on their sound. That alone was the big mistake that I made when analyzing The Gromos. They really didn’t care about how original their music was; they cared about having fun and screwing around. Hell, one of their most popular (if not, most popular) songs is called “Cut that Mullet.” Not to say that The Gromos are a joke band, or a band that goes on stage to goof off and play a random string of noises; these guys played their music well. I’m not the biggest pop punk fun, then and now, but if I had to listen to some, I wouldn’t mind listening to this. The musicianship is solid, and the energy from the live show manages to come through. This is fun music, and that is exactly what it was meant to be. On top of energetic punk tracks such as “Fair Trade,” the aforementioned “Cut that Mullet,” and “Force Fed” (which includes standard “whoahoaohoas”) are slower ballads that add a hint of variety and poignancy to the record. These songs include the epic six-minute opener “The Last Time You Cried,” another very popular Gromos song. For those who love this kind of music, they’ll be quite pleased with this CD. I’ll always remember The Gromos for many reasons. They were around when I started to get into all this, and I even managed to play a show with them with my first real band, a sad hardcore outfit named Rift. I’m glad to see that they’re still around as The Green Fuse, and I look forward to watching their evolution continue. But for those who want to travel back a year or two for 20 minutes, go over to the Ash From Sweat site and see if you can pry one of the few remaining copies of Booty away from them. favorite song: "the last time you cried" rating: 80%/100%