Notches - New Kinda Love Vinyl LP 2020

1. Room Upstairs
2. Funny How
3. Museum of More Dumb Art
4. Crystall Ball
5. Keep My Name
6. Fever Dream
7. Twist the Knife
8. Passing Phrase
9. New Kinda Love
10. Sober Souls

Notches are still young, but they've been a band since 2013, coming together as part of the New England punk scene where they also played in bands like Betty Nico, Billy Raygun, Charles and Heavy Pockets. The band quickly released a pair of early 7's that bookended their first LP High Speed Crimes in 2016. Their second LP Almost Ruined Everything was released on Salinas Records in 2018, and they immediately got to work on their third LP containing their poppiest material yet. There's still a good dose of fellow New Englander's The Lemonheads in the mix but the band was also listening to a fair share of Teenage Fanclub during the year leading up to when they entered the studio with Will Killingsworth of Ampere and The Orchid. Killingsworth took the pop structures of the songs, and dirtied them up to make the sound like there's an ugly edge to some very sweet love songs. Room Upstairs, the opener, is a perfect example. Its jagged guitars riffs and rolling snare drums give way to a noisy bridge that features a pretty acoustic guitar line drenched in feedback and layered with falsetto vocals to close out the first track. Funny How, follows that up with another great guitar line before kicking right in with 'It's funny how a song can break your heart / when you hear it once on the radio.' The A-side barrels ahead until it reaches it's apex with bassist Zac Mayeux snarling 'Just keep my name / oh, keep my name / out of your fucking mouth' on Keep My Name. The title track is a highlight of the B-side with guitarist Ezra Cohen crooning 'That's a new kinda love, for you / If it's cool it's like a drug, so cool' before closing out the song with a legitimate drum solo by Dante Guzzardi. New Kinda Love has a bit of everything.