Lobby Boxer | Eugene's Preference
Family Average: 4/7
Did you ever punch someone out in the common area of a Marriot? If you answered yes this article has little to do with you. Granted I can understand how you could be confused. There are some similarities in the title. Still I will try to make you feel at home by putting some hotel madness in a video embed below.
Today the family had a chance to review the latest album from Missouri midwest-emo band Lobby Boxer. Their latest album Eugene’s Preference has found its way to the rest of the family through Sean. I am sure we are all curious as to what the rest of them had to say about it.
Listen along below and read on to find out:
Lobby Boxer has supplied us with a refreshingly diverse pop punk album.
Exciting right from the beginning, fast-paced and fun. Pop punk but there’s some extra added flavor to it.
There’s a little something different to the vocals on “Kingshighway Dot Gov,” an imperfect addicting quality to it.
The comes “Grandpa Donut,” I’m a fan of that combination of words. I like the guitar on this track with the layers of notes coming at ya. The vocals are of a different styles on this track, more screamy, not my personal preference, but it still works for sure.
This track, like others on the album, has a breakdown towards the middles, this one being of pure noise. This song goes a lot of places in such a short time, a journey.
On “Howard” the breakdown in the middle is nice and stripped down.
Usuall pop punk albums are pretty repetitive and predictable, this is one is not.
A pop punk album with depth, talent, variety, that goes places musically.
4/7
Lobby boxer comes back on the scene swingin’!
Just three years since their last release the midwest emo legends give us Eugene's Preference. An album that builds on their established sound of doing lots of things really fast. In essence, this is still the same Lobby Boxer we know and love. That said they are here today with a whole new take on a genre that they had helped define in the early 2010s.
They continue to push their sound into new directions pulling in influence from heaps of other genres. You can hear influence from noise, and post-rock in the third track “Howard”. Gosh always have to love a complete slow crushing breakdown in a song. A little bit of dance-punk even shows up in Pyramids getting me all light on my feet.
Vocals as always are a stand out on this album. Paired with charged up lyrics and they make for the perfect scream along tunes.
The introduction of these new elements does a great job of making this new album feel like a fresh entry for a band with an already great body of work. This is a group that wants to continue to push their sound. That is the kind of stuff i like to see.
5/7
Lobby Boxer is a midwestern mall rat's pop punk dream. This album took me straight back to middle school. I could practically smell the burning plastic of my old flat iron as I let the dramatic lyrics and semi-strained vocals of this midwest emo set wash over me. Although reminiscent of that early to mid 2000s pop punk moment, Lobby Boxer gets more creative with this new release.
Their emo/pop rep is carried by the high necked guitar solos and dramatic vocals, but through frenzied layers of sounds, they seem to be coming from a progressive rock influence. This is especially true in "Howard," a track devoid of vocals that still delivers that high energy and strained emotion. It's an impressively brash, at times repetitive, accumulation of noise; the cymbals and guitar build and bash each other's heads in, while a flurry of other music flies through.
I appreciate the variation in tempo and overall experimentation within the four-track release. It's steeped in a genre they do and understand well, but each song pushes the envelope just that little bit more. It’s energetic and unapologetic; the songs open and close with an immediacy that conveys a confidence and youth. It just sounds like they're having fun, which I can one-hundred percent get behind.
4/7
Eugene’s Preference has a chaotic pop punk edge that just needs to be sharpened a bit more.
Okay so, this album is a great example of like an amalgamation of all things 2000s pop punk. From the slamming drums, driving energy, and a vocalist that just really goes for it, it has that enthusiastic youthful vibe. Each song has a slightly different flavor to it but they’re close enough to form a cohesive whole. “Knightshighway Dot Gov” was a good choice to start as it kind of epitomizes the album as a whole. “Grandpa’s Donut” takes a more punk turn and the singer kicks it up a notch. However, it got kinda messy halfway through. “Howard” is in my opinion the least strongest of the four. The first two minutes are repetitive and the changeup in notes doesn’t flow too well. After that it changes up and gets very slow and becomes more monotonous for another two minutes, and then goes back to the original style for the last one. “Pyramid” is the one that deviates the most from the others in regards to style, but it’s in a good way. There’s a weird lull point in the middle though where I lost interest until it picked up again with a neat sort of creepy-sounding guitar escalation.
This album’s got a controlled chaos feeling going on, but while that can get you attention, it can only carry you so far. They’ve got the pop punk style down, and they’ve cultivated a simple yet effective sound. But now they need to do more to keep their audience engaged.
4/7
Lobby Boxer’s talent and amazing energy really blew me away. I had never heard this band before, yet I found them immediately familiar. I loved the sharpness of the instrumentals and they matched perfectly with lyrics you could definitely scream out loud alone in your car. Their energy was most striking yet the more I listened I realized it is there ability to put a track together with all the right elements. This effort is made complete by what seemed to be an effortless performance. In order to pull that off, a lot of hard work, practice and development had to occur. I appreciate all they put into these tracks and I’m excited to hear more from this band.
5/7