by Travis Mitchell
PopMatters Music Critic
Whatever magic caught the interest of Victory Records owner Tony Brummel enough to sign Catch 22 left the band alongside former lead singer Tomas Kalnoky.
The first two tracks of Washed Up, "Leaving" and "Hard To Impress," are fairly typical ska-punk; fast, plenty of horns, reasonably clean guitars and poppy and have earned this EP its rating.
The original "American Pie" runs approximately seven and a half minutes, I imagine done in a ska-punk style Catch 22 could have trimmed that down to about four minutes and created one hell of a mosh song. Instead, the third track of Washed Up, "American Pie", is simply the chorus to the Don McLean song of the same name repeated for two minutes in ska-punk style. Simply disappointing.
The best part of the last track on Washed Up is the 15 and a half minutes of silence that follows the first 47 seconds of music. The song, "The Death Of My Blood Is Your Indulgence", must be intended to appease their predominately hard core label with strictly heavily distorted guitar power chords and unintelligible lyrics. Not to lose out on a great opportunity to suck in their listeners, Catch 22 has made a joke of the garbled and incoherent lyrics and are holding a contest asking their audience to provide the lyrics for the song.
The last eight and a half minutes of the EP is a recording from a live show and contains two and a half songs from Keasbey Nights (Catch 22's debut album for Victory Records). I'm not sure if this was intended as a tribute to former lead singer Tomas Kalnoky, but these two songs ("On & On & On" and "Kristina") plus the short clip of "9mm & A Three Piece Suit" sound better than the rest of the EP combined.
Does anybody know how well CDs work as fabric softener?