This record has a couple of song titles with hieroglyphs and some lines sung in Japanese, but barring that, it could have been done in California and no one would have batted an eyelid. On Eleven Fire Crackers,
Ellegarden offer 11 (well, obviously) pop-punk tracks that follow
blink-182 in their prime -- i.e., around the end of their career, when the Americans got the dorky teenage humor out of their systems but hadn't yet succumbed to the bloated pretentiousness that was
Angels & Airwaves. But blaming
Ellegarden for a lack of originality wouldn't make much sense, because all the American pop-punkers are doing it anyway, and what's more, the Japanese boys actually handle their task very well.
Ellegarden find just the right balance in their songs. They're not afraid to be serious (a problem for many bands of the same ilk) but don't overdo the "anthemic" part -- and they have the hooks to back up the teenage emotions they're trying to express. There are a couple of blunders, particularly "Gunpowder Valentine," but songs like "Salamander" more than make up for it, even crossing into power pop territory and almost drawing comparisons to
Jimmy Eat World or
Weezer's poppier moments, were it not for the fact that those bands would never be able to keep the pace with
Ellegarden. Eleven Fire Crackers is obviously an album listeners have heard before under different names (done by the same band, as well as by many others), but there's no denying it's a fun listen. ~ Alexey Eremenko