The Serious Geniuses - You Can Steal The Riffs, But You Can't Steal The Talent

It's only the second day of the new year, my --th birthday is still weeks away, and I feel like a jaded old man. I spent the better part of this morning cleaning up my office space, throwing out a ton of shit, and flipping through stacks of old yellowed fanzines. Oh, the memories. HeartattaCk actually meant something at some point, there were still kick ass compilation albums with unreleased songs and lengthy booklets, kids made mixtapes and not online MP3-blogs, and everything seemed much more honest and simple. All the time, the Serious Geniuses were blasting in the background over and over again, and I couldn't help but think how awesome they are.

Stolen riffs, yes. Talent, yes. New all time favorite record, probably no. But this is the nature of this disc: it doesn't get you all pumped up to go out and skate, it doesn't depress you, and it sure as hell doesn't scream in your face - it's just there. You Can Steal The Riffs is like your best friends: you don't have to call them once a week to know they'll always be there for you. Sure, it's sometimes boring having them around, sometimes they even annoy you, sometime you don't want to see them for months, but you always find yourself coming back to the half forgotten inside jokes and the nostalgia.

If You Can Steal The Riffs had been released 15 years ago on let's say Crank! or Jade Tree, (a) reviewers would have compared it to Jawbreaker, Braid, or even Lifetime (when they were still boring and out of tune), (b) it'd be out of print by now and being sold on Ebay for half a fortune, (c) a song or two would have ended up on the soundtrack for TV shows like My So-Called Life, and (d) you would still shake your fist of the younger kids for not remembering the classics.

But hey, it's 2009 already, and I can only recommend getting your wrinkled hands on this record, playing it to death for a week, and then coming back half a year later. Fuck nostalgia. The good old times are right here and right now.

www.seriousgeniuses.com
www.kissofdeathrecords.com