SOUND BITES

If you've frequented this blog over the years, we've probably already had this talk. However, for the sake of the others, there are few groups of fans so fickle and doggedly closed minded as punk fans. A punk band that dares to stray outside their fans' comfort zone is often met with dismissal and/or disdain or far worse, and anyone who doubts that can talk to Laura Jane Grace about Against Me's early days . So, when your band draws such nuanced criticism as "kill it with fire", "puts me to sleep", "fucking sellouts", "adult contemporary hard rock" and "gay", as Ceremony did for a tune as perfectly serviceable as Adult (a single from previous album Zoo ), it's pretty safe to say you've started to expand your sound and refine your songwriting. Sorry about your feelings, YouTube commenters, but Ceremony progressed beyond your narrow scope of what music is then and continue to do so on fifth album The L-Shaped Man...

CEREMONY Adult From: Zoo Released: March 6 My motto may as well be, “bring me your discarded punk bands, and I shall give them a home”. It seems every year there's at least one band that releases a record i completely dig, only to find out that all of their fans hate them because they're not hardcore enough anymore. Ceremony released a hell of a record this year in Zoo , and it got pissed on by their “true” fans on account of it having actual songs on it rather than minute-long bursts of blistering punk with no sense of songwriting or execution. Don't get me wrong, I liked unhinged and loud as much as the next fellow; but if a band writes a primal howler as satisfying as Adult , why dismiss it for being a little slower and more organized?