The Lillingtons

Backchannel Broadcast (2001)

Damien Lynch

The Lillingtons. Who? Beats me, as far as I know they don't even have an official (or fan) website. However, I picked up a copy of a couple of albums from these guys - one of them being called "Death by Television", and then this one - entitled "Backchannel Broadcast". I do believe the only reason I bough these were because I had money in my pocket at the time, and I thought the cover art was very cool looking.

So what do these guys sound like? Well… let's take the guitars from the Ramones and cross that with the Misfits, harden it up a little bit, take a vocalist that sounds a lot like the young Dexter Holland (pre-Smash, that is)… and you have this band. I'm not sure what the kids would call it, probabaly just pop-punk, or melodic punk. When I think of pop-punk I think of mainstream punk like Sum41 and Blink182, though, so I'm not going to even try to label these guys.

This does have a very oldschool sound, and look. There are 16 songs on this album which clock in to be about 24 minutes long. But it's a damn good 24 hours. The first time you hear these guys, you'll think "have I heard these guys before?"… they're that catchy. My only complaint is that the first time I heard it, every few songs I'd think "hey this is a cover of 'I Wanna be Sedated', oh wait.. no it's not" because the music is very similar. It's modernized, sure, but similar. I'm actually not a fan of the whole 70's punk sound, so I don't want to say if you're a fan of The Ramones then you should check this out. I could just say, if you like good music, check these guys out - because that's what they are.