River City Rebels Play and Live Punk -- Album Review

NEW YORK (Top40 Charts) - As a new generation of music fans pumps its collective fist and embraces punk music for what it has become, it is refreshing to find a band connected to the past -- one hand on the guitar and one foot in the pit. Like many of today's punk fans, the River City Rebels is a group of sophomores that has just joined the punk scene with Racism, Religion and War, but this group has passed history class and knows enough about life to realize that most of it sucks. Playing to Live, Living to Play is an album about death, drunken fathers, small towns and working dead-end jobs, but the band finds salvation playing punk rock and you can find some salvation listening to it.

"Day to Day" and "Gotta Get It" give the listener two main viewpoints: life is short and you can do something to make it worthwhile, and these themes run as seamlessly through the album as they have throughout the punk genre. The River City

Rebels is a band with more members (seven in all) than guitar chords and enough small-town realism to deliver its music without big-city fluff. In little over half and hour, you will learn that the band does care about its music even though it asks why in "Life of a Rebel." And, you will remember during "22 Years" that some things are simple even though life isn't. As a young kid, you learn that you don't have to call yourself cool if you already are.
The same should hold true for calling yourself a rebel, but the members of River City Rebels are calling attention to a meaning of the word that may have been lost on the new audience. It's not about spiking your hair and safety-pinning your newest patch to your oldest shirt -- it's a deeper mixture. Rebellion and punk were meant to blend like this.