The Cheap Cassettes – All Anxious All The Time

With All Anxious All The Time, The Cheap Cassettes usher in the new year With a collection of catchy, rough-around-the-edges (in all the right ways) powerful, pop songs. Their sound is a melding of influences; punk, Seattle grunge and power pop. You’ll hear elements of The Clash and Super Deluxe. The Cheap Cassettes can be as in your face as The Buzzcocks. And being located in Seattle, one can’t help but notice a vocal similarity to Steve Pearson of The Heats, one of Seattle’s great ones.

The Cheap Cassettes are Charles Matthews and Kevin Parkhurst, former members of the Dimestore Haloes. All Anxious All The Time consists of songs written over time in various locations and eventually recorded between 2011 and 2014. Chad and Kevin not only wrote the material, they played every instrument, mixed and mastered the entire effort.

The Clash-like crashing guitars in the uber-energetic title track immediately grabbed my attention. The big payoff was the shout-along chorus, which had more of a feel of a Plimsouls fan tape. “Wreckless” melded Buzzcocks guitars with a killer hook that had me from the very start. The hypnotic groove of “Good and Shitty” and ringing pop-punk guitars make this song highly enjoyable.

The best track on the LP however, is “Seconds of Pleasure”. Imagine “A Million Miles Away” with the guitar driven energy of “Ever Fallen In Love”. This song alone is worth the price of the disk.

There’s eleven tracks in all and not one clunker in the bunch. If The Cheap Cassettes’ All Anxious All The Time is any indicative of what 2017 holds for power pop fans, it’s going to be a VERY good year. Get this one from Rum Bar records HERE.