Two Quick Reviews: ONE WIN CHOICE, X-PISTOLS

ONE WIN CHOICE – Conveyor (Jump Start): New Jersey’s ONE WIN CHOICE continue to grow out their sound on Conveyor, improving upon the band’s neck-snapping style of BIG WIG, STRUNG OUT, and A WILHELM SCREAM melodic punk/hardcore (with plenty of smart lyrics to boot). Two notable elements carry throughout the full-length — a mammoth, punchy recording and a loose, dynamic songwriting element that trades away formal structures for manic energy and only tiny bits of repetition. The latter is no surprise for long-time fans of the band, but Conveyor moves up from being “scattershot” to simply being fueled an angry itch that can’t be scratched out.

X-PISTOLS – Shoot To Kill (Suburban Noize): Shoot To Kill is a Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon sprung to life, and by far, the strangest punk rock release I’ve heard in a long time. As a side project of the hip-hop oriented KOTTONMOUTH KINGS, X-PISTOLS has been branded as an intentional throwback to the SoCal punk of the early and mid 80s (with some members actually being involved in punk rock at the time). They got the sound right – ADOLESCENTS, DI, AGENT ORANGE, etc., it’s all here in musical spirit, at least for the first eight songs or so. Then the band gets lazy in the second half of things and the music devolves into cheesy rap metal with one dimensional riffs and beats. And it gets worse… at least half (maybe all, who the hell knows) of the 18 songs (almost an hour of music) are plagued by random sound effects of gun fire, police sirens, more gun fire, and a whole litany of cartoonish noises that only a five year old would find funny. What in the hell?!? This is like a concept album created by kids who played with one of those “electronic fart sound” toys from the late 80s for like 10 hours straight. Cut this thing in half and ditch the automatic weapons noise and maybe we can get along…