Potty Mouth deliver familiar but exhilarating punk-pop on SNAFU

It’s for that reason, that the record took so long to release. It’s for that reason also, that it comes as a surprise that SNAFU is, as far as punk records go, fairly straight forward. It’s not however, a ‘safe’ record. While there’s a blatant pop sensibility at the album’s core, no doubt stemming at least in part, from the production duties of Courtney Ballard, it’s a body of work completed under no-one’s direction but their own. And while the band’s snarling power-pop might feel somewhat familiar, even from the word go, there’s no denying the defiant sense of fuck you frivolity and saccharine snarls that permeate SNAFU in its entirety.

Throwing out comparisons to other bands is in this writer’s opinion, often a lazy way to write reviews, but it’s impossible to write something about SNAFU without mentioning the likes of Cheap Trick, Green Day, or The Breeders. Many might dismiss Potty Mouth’s penchant for wearing their influences on their sleeve as unoriginal, but here it feels equal parts homage and pastiche, and as such it’s difficult to view the record with any sort of bitterness, seeming much like accepting an invitation to a birthday party, with the sole intention of popping all the balloons.

Of course, it goes without saying the grizzled punks among us would likely view tracks such as "Do It Again", "Liar" or "Smash Hit" with archaic and somewhat misdirected disdain, but they’d be missing the tongue-firmly-in-cheek point: SNAFU is a record which doesn’t have to adhere to any sort of convention, be that those in the music industry, or those upheld by the punk community, ever oblivious of the irony.

Too pop for the punks and too punk for the mainstream, SNAFU is an album that will surely divide opinion, and it almost certainly feels too familiar on more than one occasion, but when a record is this much fun, it’s easy to forgive minor foibles.