At my house, we call them "uh-ohs"

There’s something very facile and high-schooly about The Drums – vocalist Jonathan Pierce freely cops the same flamboyant, narcissistic angst perfected by The Cure and The Smiths, while the rest of the band rips pages from the Post-Punk for Effeminate, Nervous Dummies handbook with equal eagerness (the pages on XTC and Joy Division are conspicuously absent, and there’s fucking chocolate fingerprints all over the Echo and the Bunnymen sidebar. Also, it smells like someone took it into the bathroom. What the fuck, guys?).

I can’t endorse this band without acknowledging their willingness to bite styles – that being said, now that this tendency is out in the open, let’s all tap our toes and play “Let’s Go Surfing” forty billion times, because, realistically, Robert Smith probably won’t be fronting Joy Division anytime soon. Got a thing for goofy, simplistic little choruses? WHO DOESN’T? The goofy “hear-hear-hear-hear-hear-hear-hee-aaa-ee-aart” chant in “I Felt Stupid” could coax a singalong from the saltiest of neutered, literate, and bourgeois post-punkers – it’s one of those songs that sounds like it’s actually being played in a weird extrasensory dream-dimension manipulated and governed by John Hughes, in which all conflicts are resolved (by law) in your shitty high school gym, decked-out with balloons and confetti for junior prom. Because, in this shadowy dream dimension, HUGHES IS LAW. Other hilarious facts about this dimension: Molly Ringwald controls eighty percent of the world’s nuclear arsenal, and there’s a movie called The Breakfast Club 2: More Breakfast, in which Estevez and Judd Nelson swap peewee hockey coaching tips.