"My mates went on holiday to the Isles for this one. Galactic romantic entropy three sheets to the 'Wind. Saxy glimmers, broken sunbeams, oil dancing in a puddle of water in a parking lot somewhere in St. Louis or Birmingham. And just as first-wave yankee punk was decidedly solipsistic, the Poms folded in a more civic bent to explain the zeitgeist of generational disaffection. Is "Scared To Care" about spikey punks whose apartments are littered with Amazon boxes? Is "Biggest Sale of The Year" an indictment of late-stage capitalism? Is "The Milkman" an effective populist who wants you to sink so that he can swim? Is this record more political than those dystopian hardcore records you sold when a nice girl opened your eyes once? Merely conjecture...
It's an album dripping with clandestine musical intelligence, artisanal song-writing, great voices. The illegitimate son of Dinosaurs' bassist isn't in the mix this time, but I can assure you his spirit is there - I can almost hear the glass of side mirrors cascading to Richmond Ave on a drunken bike ride 15 years before Josh Allen and Conway The Machine made The City That Always Sleeps cool! (NOT recommended... you truly cannot cheat Carma).
What is soul? Soul is finding your own catalytic converter at the thrift store. Soul is trying out for the Harlem Globetrotters on your 37th birthday and it not going so well. Soul is wearing those attractive bygone eras on your sleeve without hesitation or embarrassment. Pentatonic rock didn't exactly bubble from a serious bog, and when adults who partake become artistically conservative, grow egos in a Petri dish somewhere in the well-adjusted hyper-capitalist cityslicker life they've created because they can seemingly play Vibrators riffs better than the actual kids, everything is lost! Class know this, resisting that spiritual deficit of our collective moment with the voice of honest men trying to have fun in this fuckin' wacky world, unafraid to rhyme words like "narcissist" and "anarchist". I mean, how many songs wouldn't have a pinky toe to pirouette on if "school" and "fool" didn't rhyme?! Now get your ass to Class." -Brandon Gaffney
Our take: Tucson, Arizona’s Class is back with a brand new album and their second Record of the Week nod from Sorry State, though all four of Class’s previous releases have been worthy of said honor. From the jump, Class has sounded to me like a band out of time, a relic from a bygone era where crafting a perfect pop song was way higher on a band’s to-do list than getting their look right or perfectly replicating the guitar tone on whatever collector scum 7” whose sound they’re trying to replicate. This is probably why people have trouble describing Class’s music succinctly, because their sense of style is amorphous and flexible, able to shift to serve the song, which is Class’s true master. Class’s raw, high-energy productions and big guitar sounds mark them as punk, but they’ve always reminded me most of the ’77-era UK bands who were unwilling or unable to fully embrace punk’s year zero mentality. I’m thinking of the Lurkers, the early Stranglers, 999… The “power-pop” tag also gets thrown around, but Class’s songs generally lack the saccharine immediacy of bands like the Exploding Hearts or the Number Ones (though fans of the latter will fall pretty quickly for the magical pre-chorus in “Not an Idiot”). This means it might take you a spin or two longer to sing along, but it also means Class’s songs don’t wear out your ear or grow stale with repetition… I can listen (and have listened) to A Healthy Alternative over and over and its hooks just sink in deeper. If, like me, you’re too old and cranky for straight bubblegum, but can’t fully get rid of your pop sweet tooth, A Healthy Alternative has the perfect balance of sugar and salt.