Socialburn: “The Beauty of Letting Go”

(Iroc Entertainment)

Never mind that this album is nearly a year old and the cover is more hideous than a Queer Eye makeover of Ron Jeremy. After the lousy deal Socialburn was handed at this year’s Locobazooka in Boston they’re due for some silver lining - not only were they the only band marooned at the “Harder/Faster” oi-core stages that does grunge well (the event’s headliner was all three corporeal members of Alice n Chains and a Staley clone, fer crissakes), but they were only given 4 songs to make their case after Burn In Silence hogged up most of their time working over the half-naked moshers with cockeyed rants about how girls are ugly and whatnot, which probably made Socialburn even more nervous than they must have been already, being that their tunes are slick enough to get Rosie O’Donnell into a pair of clear heels. “Be a Man” features a hooky plink-guitar ditty surfing over a fuzz-washed riff lifted from someone like Gin Blossoms, Nail Alday’s Gavin Rossdale roar yin-yanned by bassist Dusty Price’s Sevendust helium-drone.