SPINS

+44
When Your Heart Stops Beating
Interscope Records

Travis Barker, former Blink 182 member, seems to be the king of pop punk side-projects. His newest venture is called +44, named after London and its area code, because that was the band’s inception point. Ex- Blink Mark Hoppus tags along for this ride too, bringing Shane Gallagher and Craig Fairbaugh with him, both on guitar. My guess is that it took two new guys to replace Blink’s vocalist Tom Delonge. The album When your heart stops beating is good. Not great, but good. For those that have yet to get over Blink’s hiatus, this is the next best thing. The similar qualities it holds with Blink leaves one question: Who really had the influence on how that band sounded? Other side projects, such as The Transplants, Boxcar Racer and Angels and Airwaves all hold relatively significant differences. Not so for this one. For instance, Hoppus has one of the new guitarists doing backup vocals sounding much like the vocals from Blink.

If you are desperately in need of a fix, go nuts with these guys. They are good, but once again, not great. Lyrics like “Let’s slit our wrists and burn down something beautiful,” stick out, but are a little odd considering that Hoppus, who does the writing, is now in his 30s and married with a kid. Does he really still feel like that’s something he wants to do so badly, he had to write a song about it?

4/5

– Lindsay Wood

Dredg
Live at the Fillmore
Interscope Records

Live DVDs seem to be the norm these days. A “best of” record I can still understand. But a plain old live recording, with no extra footage and no shady previously unreleased B-sides? The marketing strategy behind this, especially coming from a band like Dredg, is simply baffling.

Dredg shares one thing in common with the likes of Circa Survive: their music is awkward. Labelled as progressive alternative, Dredg’s sound is not heavy enough to be mosh-worthy, not soft enough to force the show into a sit-down venue, and not epic enough to provoke ear-splitting sing-alongs. It isn’t much of anything in particular, really.

The record actually kicks off to a pretty decent start, with songs like solid fan-favourite “Bug Eyes” and a remix of Serj Tankian’s “Ode To The Sun” opening the way. for the remaining 16 tracks that sound the same. Sadly, this is representative both of the way Dredg sound on a record and at a live show.

If you’ve already caught Dredg live–they played here as part of the Taste of Chaos tour last spring on the MySpace stage–you know you don’t need this record. If you’ve never heard of Dredg before, this record is probably not the best place to start. Even the live photos in the CD insert are painfully bad. We’ll let this one slide off the charts before it even gets anywhere near them.

1/5

– Jenny Chukhovich

Two Hours Traffic
Isolator
Universal

With the recent explosion of Canadian indie rock bands emerging from Toronto and Montreal, Two Hours Traffic is throwing Charlottetown, P.E.I, into the mix of Canadian indie hotbeds.

Following their critically acclaimed 2005 self-titled debut EP, THT have released Isolator. The six-song EP continues where their first album left off. Their format hasn’t changed much, but it really didn’t have to. Produced by East Coast rock celebrity Joel Plaskett, who also lends his vocals and guitar to the album, Isolator offers some of the catchiest songs of the year. Switching between power pop and alt-country, THT uses understated guitar melodies, memorable hooks and lead singer Liam Corcoran’s fragile vocal styling to create their sound.

Though not groundbreaking, the songs on Isolator are consistently good. Standout tracks “Stuck for the Summer” and “Newlove” rely on synth-infused pop over catchy “Strokes-like” guitar riffs to create a sound similar to Rooney, had Rooney grown up in East Coast Canada. In fact both bands have had songs featured on the OC.

The closing track on Isolator, “Close up to Me”, is a drumless acoustic country ballad which would be completely clich