Chris DeLine

Blackpool Lights led by Jim Suptic, formerly the frontman of the now expired Kansas City pop-punkers The Get Up Kids, started as far more of a new beginning for its members than a continuation of old musical habits. For Suptic, This Town’s Disaster will be released on his Curb Appeal Records, and suits itself as a transition into something that attempts to further himself from the band that played such a large part in his life for roughly eleven years. For drummer Billy Brimblecom, the time of the album’s production was a dark place in which he was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma and was forced to save his life by living through the amputation of his leg. And as the transition rolls on.

The spiritual and mental change that has come through this album ineffectively translates in terms of a noticeable musical difference between past bands and the present, however. The band’s first single “Blue Skies” was actually written as a track for The Get Up Kids, showing that there is still one foot firmly planted in the past. Further along as This Town’s Disaster begins to slow down, tracks such as “Crash Sounds” drag the already powerless progression of the album even further. There is a part of the album that aches to become enjoyable, but by the time it reaches its finale there is little left to reminisce about.

The band doesn’t perform a terrible set, by any means, but a dated set by most standards. Despite the fact that the album was written while an assortment of traumatic events were occurring, it still stood as an opportunity for a group of musicians to lyrically and musically move away from a time and a sound that had passed. The band could have put together a truly emotional piece of work that offered a dissimilar output than its members’ traditional pieces. But instead, that opportunity has seemingly passed the group by.

[This post was first published by Culture Bully.]