When we hear about the punk spirit, it doesn’t mean that those embued with it are just making music that echoes those formative years, all subversive and incendiary style over substance. It has more to do with an attitude and approach, a certain quality woven into the heart of the music, and the people making it. It is something that swerves conformity and comfort zones and embraces a spirit of sonic adventure.
Fake Plastic is a band that embodies this idea brilliantly, and even though you wouldn’t exactly describe “Riptide” as a punk song, the spirit of those times, that creativity and sense of outsiderness courses through its veins.
“Riptide” runs on a cool riff, which is more garage rock than punk (though who can say where one ended and the other began), and if the song is full of raw and abrasive sounds, this is balanced by a muscular melody that runs through the music. Guitars gnash, basslines, and beats groove and grind, and a perhaps unexpected thread of infectiousness draws you in.
If punk, to some people at least, was all about loud and shouty impactfulness, “Riptide” reminds us that there is a fine line to be walked between punk and rock, between pop and a hard place, between power and poignancy, between chaos and contagion. Fake Plastic walks this line to perfection.
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