A

Selected Discography:

How Ace Are Buildings (Tycoon/London, 1997)

A vs. Monkey Kong (Tycoon/London, 1999)

Started in the mid-1980s as the prog influenced, Grand Designs, this Suffolk, England band decided to do 180 by fusing baggy pants Grebo psychedelia with baggy pants SoCal melodic skate rock. It’s all loud guitars and catchy riffs on A’s first full-length, How Ace Are Buildings. The entire album is ripe for whatever X-Games/Warped tour is coming near you with its head bouncing hip-hop drumbeats, Britpop keyboards, and nonsensical singalong lyrics that conveys a general feeling of bratty adolescent fun as well as post adolescent angst. The album only suffers in its overlength of both the runtime of the album as well as the songs. The follow-up, A vs. Monkey Kong suffers from the same problems as its predecessor, the songs are too long and there’s too many of them. However, this time the punk energy is on the backburner as the band tries to rewrite Blur’s “Song 2” several diverse ways to underwhelming success. Songs like “Old Folks,” “Miles Away” and “Jason’s Addiction” recapture the catchy boisterous fun of How Ace Are Buildings, but the rest of the album is mishmash of undercooked melodic alterna-punk tunes with a bunch of bloops and bleeps with lyrics about missing Lake Tahoe.