Hypercaffium Spazzinate

One of the strongest albums this band has released in thirty years.

Muscular production from the Blasting Room's Jason Livermore brings Stephen Egerton's melodic guitar to the forefront, and Alvarez and Stevenson's lockstep percussion sounds downright youthful.

Hypercaffium Spazzin is a great collection of their trademark short and snappy songs.

Hypercaffium Spazzinate finds the band reenergized and more characteristically succinct. [No. 134, p.55]

It’s all smart stuff, but presented with tunes that hook into your brain. They’ve lost none of their spark in the 34 years since their debut, and have the edge on bands half their age.

An ability to switch seamlessly from bruising hardcore to sunbursts of pop melody always marked Descendents out from the SoCal crowd, and that’s still the case here.

The band sounds better than ever, too, mounting a muscular four-way attack that captures the immediacy of their frenetic synchronicity better than any non-live album of theirs to date.

These are 16 full-on punk rock blasts with little time to hold your breath, but repeated listening reveals hidden layers of melody of nuance that is easy to miss with the initial short, sharp shock.

At 16 tracks, Hypercaffium Spazzinate contains some filler, but with only three songs crossing the three-minute mark, these lesser moments breeze by without consequence.

They’ve practiced patience and waited to arrive at 16 songs that feature either airtight pop melodies or a throwback to the fury of their early days. Never before have those two facets of the band’s personality merged so seamlessly on record.

The songs prove, yet again, that the Descendents’ best cuts fully transcend their genre. They may be punk in speed, but it’s not their velocity that makes them lovable. It’s their tunes.

Fortunately for the diehards, Hypercaffium Spazzinate is devoid of the stylistic overindulgence or inflated self-importance often associated with hiatus-ending efforts.

Descendents are playing punk rock for the same reasons they always did--they want to, and they need to--and the fact they can mature while sounding thoroughly like themselves makes Hypercaffium Spazzinate a welcome late-era addition to their catalog.

It’s the sound of four guys with a deep bond, making music on their own terms. On paper that seems simple, but in practice on this album it sounds pretty damn strong.

Hypercaffium could have been just another instalment in Descendents' long and fruitful career, and that would have been just fine; its biggest surprise is that it offers fans something new if nevertheless familiar, thereby cementing the band's continued relevance after all these years.

No matter how sobering Hypercaffium Spazzinate gets, Descendents keep things light by playing these wistful, grown-ass songs like teenagers.

There are times when their elementary to songwriting can make them look as if they’re stuck in their teenage angst, which is expected considering their genuinely fun play on nostalgia is quite detrimental to their brand. But the tunes do stack up, and when it’s delivered with this much conviction, that’s reason enough to rekindle that loyal, longstanding friendship with their most ardent fans.

The most surprising thing about the record is just how blatantly a group that once skewered conformity in songs like "Suburban Home" brashly embraces nostalgia.

With self-awareness and personal catharsis equally high on the agenda, everybody's favourite nerdcore veterans may not have grown up just yet, but they've certainly become better at acting their age. [Sep 2016, p.98]

A solid comeback, then. [Sep 2016, p.105]