The Leftovers

A quick google on the name throws up many bands called The Leftovers but this is the three piece from Portland, Maine that we're dealing with here. Imagine The Smithereens wearing jetpacks and harbouring some Tommy James and The Shondells intent. 13 songs clocking in at just below 29 minutes, looking at them on the cover, you'd never think that three youngsters could kick up such a full-blooded racket. They've been abetted in their mission by the aforementioned Mr Weasel and his sequencing has been carried out with precision rock'n'roll action in mind. This is what I expected The Fratellis to sound like according to their press. Superior pop hammered out with a gusto that's rare in these processed pre-packed, pigeon-holed times. I'm sure that yours truly is well outside their demographic but they're bloody stuck with me. The sound is as clean as a whistle and that drum propulsion really carries the epic proportions of the "teenage excitement, romance and mystery". The Leftovers are anything but." - Lindsay Hutton

A quick google on the name throws up many bands called The Leftovers but this is the three piece from Portland, Maine that we're dealing with here. Imagine The Smithereens wearing jetpacks and harbouring some Tommy James and The Shondells intent. 13 songs clocking in at just below 29 minutes, looking at them on the cover, you'd never think that three youngsters could kick up such a full-blooded racket. They've been abetted in their mission by the aforementioned Mr Weasel and his sequencing has been carried out with precision rock'n'roll action in mind. This is what I expected The Fratellis to sound like according to their press. Superior pop hammered out with a gusto that's rare in these processed pre-packed, pigeon-holed times. I'm sure that yours truly is well outside their demographic but they're bloody stuck with me. The sound is as clean as a whistle and that drum propulsion really carries the epic proportions of the "teenage excitement, romance and mystery". The Leftovers are anything but." - Lindsay Hutton

But holy shit if these auspicious young punks from Portland Maine of all places didn't make my weathered brain numb like a night spent sipping Crown Royal whiskey from a flask under the right field bleachers while the herd of nerds boogie down inside the high school gymnasium at the ice cream social. These thirteen atomic bombs will blast those stupid piercings out of your rotten face like a squishy white pimple, savagely transporting your adolescent physique back to the glorious years of all-ages shows when vibrant young kiddos pogoed and moshed and wrecked circle pits with clinched fists and spiked wrists at fucking 924 Gilman Street or in the goddamn Stop-N-Slurp parking lot. - The Tripwire

"Get any punk rocker talking and, sooner or later, you'll get him reminiscing about the good old days. Could be he talks of 1977, maybe 1982, maybe 1986. Everybody, it seems, in the punk underground lost their heart to a bygone era. Fair enough.

But when The Leftovers start waxing nostalgic on On the Move, they're not stuck on one of punk's halcyon heydays, but whip out an uncut love of mid-'90s pop punk. Sure, it was derided by everyone at the time, but The Leftovers' brand of spiky, buzzy pop-punk anthems show it might not be too much longer before we're waxing nostalgic about the glory days of 1996. Gearing up guitars just noisy enough to leave your ears ringing without destroying the trio's innate melodies, The Leftovers drink from the same well of inspiration that used to quench acts such as The Queers, The Riverdales and Chixdiggit. And if that set of influences isn't exactly the hippest formula to be working from in just about any circle, it's not going to dampen The Leftovers' enthusiasm.

Ripping into 13 lightening-speed pop tunes simply for the fun of it, On the Move is a reminder of pop punk's more innocent days, days before MySpace kids' fickle interests, underage bloggers and the mall-punk phenomenon derailed its giddy, proud-to-wallow-in-obscurity spirit. It's something that many of today's young nippers might not even recognize for what it is. With 13 cuts -- and nary a one that sticks around beyond the three-minute mark -- that superbly straddle the line between garage dissonance and high-fructose ear candy, The Leftovers play pop-punk like it's supposed to be: young, loud and poppy. The act's formula doesn't vary a bit throughout On the Move, but it doesn't really need to: singer/bassist Kurt Baker's tales of single-serving heartbreaks come at listeners with a one-two punch of his deliciously tuneful tenor and harmonies provided by guitarist Andrew Rice, who's also a master at drenching his rapid-fire progressions in pearls of buzzy distortion. Baker and drummer Adam Woronoff keep tempos just slightly below the speed-freak levels. As the band crashes through its set list, songs like "Run Real Fast," "She She She" and "Mind Off You" hint that the band's looked deeper than the overlooked pantheon of '90s pop-punk, as shades of Beach Boys, Ramones and Big Star melodies seep through the cracks and gum everything together.

These days, every punk band under the sun has an angle, a crazy haircut, a dude who can scream while another dude sings or a fascination with confusing emotional problems with physical injuries. Not so with The Leftovers: On the Move is the sort of straight-up chunk of three-chord pop meant as an escape from all the posturing in the mainstream. Isn't that what really got you into pop punk in the first place? - Matt Schild

But holy shit if these auspicious young punks from Portland Maine of all places didn't make my weathered brain numb like a night spent sipping Crown Royal whiskey from a flask under the right field bleachers while the herd of nerds boogie down inside the high school gymnasium at the ice cream social. These thirteen atomic bombs will blast those stupid piercings out of your rotten face like a squishy white pimple, savagely transporting your adolescent physique back to the glorious years of all-ages shows when vibrant young kiddos pogoed and moshed and wrecked circle pits with clinched fists and spiked wrists at fucking 924 Gilman Street or in the goddamn Stop-N-Slurp parking lot. - The Tripwire

Hailing from Portland, Maine, the Leftovers are the best of the new wave of pop-punk bands. This trio blew me away with their great, if uneven, 2006 release, Party Tonight but their newest album (on Rally Records), On The Move is in a whole 'nother league. What sets these cats apart from the crowd is their unique combination of popping-at-the-seams energy, an effortless melding of heart-wrenching melodies and balls-out rock, and some of the most flat-out amazing songs I've ever heard. The result is something like the Flamin' Groovies as played by the Ramones, only a hundred times better than you can imagine. Behind frontman Kurt Baker's awe-inspiring shock-fro is a one-track mind teeming with nothing but cosmic hooks of the sort that just ruin other bands for you; this dude can write a song, brothers and sisters! I received a co-producer credit for On The Move but I'm not making a dime from the sales so you can trust me when I tell you that this album is the best damn slab of Rock to come barreling down the pike in too many moons to count.


- benweasel.mu.nu

I could have sworn I'd used that "Meet The Leftovers" tag a year or two ago, and it turns out I was right. On that occasion I was posting about this young Portland, Maine band's picture-perfect covers of a few Beatles songs, and noting that they were a musical force to be reckoned with, even if they were barely out of high school.

Since then they've gone on to produce a couple records of original material and played gigs all over the Eastern United States and, in a real coup for an as yet barely known band, the UK. But they're not likely to remain barely known for long, not with the brilliant songwriting and performances they've been turning in, and even more so now that Ben Weasel has taken them under his not insubstantial wing.

The Leftovers have already recorded some sterling stuff (it doesn't hurt that Adam, their drummer, is already an accomplished studio engineer) for the up-and-coming Rally Records (the record label that is literally from Mars). Now it looks (don't ask me for details, as I'm in the wrong hemisphere to be up to date on these inter-label goings-on) as though Mr. Rally has formed some sort of alliance with Ben's new digital-only Mendota Recording Co., so exactly where and how the new Leftovers album presently being recorded will become available to the public is still a little unclear to me. One thing that's not unclear, however, is that it will almost certainly be sensational, so you'd better plan on getting it ASAP. Ben waxes a bit lyrical on these guys, telling those who suspect he might be, as the British say, overegging the pudding, that, "I saw Operation Ivy and Green Day a bunch of times before they got big." The implication is clear that he considers the Leftovers to be in that same class, and he may well be right.

I know the kind of excitement they engender when they take the stage is akin to what I felt when I saw Green Day and Op Ivy in the early days; the one thing that might - I say "might" - stop me from unhesitatingly declaring them the next big thing would be that as of last summer, anyway, they were still coalescing as a band and developing their own unique style. Both Green Day and Op Ivy, new as they were when I first saw them, already had that sound that set them apart from every other band, whereas the Leftovers - again, as of last summer - still had a tendency to sound like a compendium of about half a dozen different totally great bands. At the rate they were going then, however, I'd expect them to come roaring out of the blocks with some staggeringly great new stuff and remove any residual doubts I might have. - Larry Livermore

Hailing from Portland, Maine, the Leftovers are the best of the new wave of pop-punk bands. This trio blew me away with their great, if uneven, 2006 release, Party Tonight but their newest album (on Rally Records), On The Move is in a whole 'nother league. What sets these cats apart from the crowd is their unique combination of popping-at-the-seams energy, an effortless melding of heart-wrenching melodies and balls-out rock, and some of the most flat-out amazing songs I've ever heard. The result is something like the Flamin' Groovies as played by the Ramones, only a hundred times better than you can imagine. Behind frontman Kurt Baker's awe-inspiring shock-fro is a one-track mind teeming with nothing but cosmic hooks of the sort that just ruin other bands for you; this dude can write a song, brothers and sisters! I received a co-producer credit for On The Move but I'm not making a dime from the sales so you can trust me when I tell you that this album is the best damn slab of Rock to come barreling down the pike in too many moons to count.


- benweasel.mu.nu