Upon the first listen to By Surprise’s ‘Criteria’, my doubts as to whether the New Jersey quartet’s sound was really as good as it seemed to be lay in the deceiving effects that nostalgia can have upon us as humans, or more specifically, a wariness I have developed following a personal experience I had with Findus’ Crispy Pancakes.
When I was a child I used to go crazy for these cheese filled breaded pancake things. I swear it got to the point where I had developed a dependency upon them akin to a tiny crack addict waiting for his mum to cook up a fix for him. So when, as an adult, I saw them in Iceland for just £1.50, you can imagine the joy that overcame me at the prospect of reliving my childhood glories as a twenty year old. Naturally, I stormed home and cooked them up straight away.
When I realized after getting one bite into my first ‘cake, that they are actually the most disgusting things on the face of the planet and I had lied to myself, it was completely soul-destroying stuff. Later on that day, as I was scraping them into the bin with the rest of the kitchen based shit, I had an epiphany which forked off into two different roads; either I was a just an idiot as a child, or when you remember things from the past you tend to glorify them.
So when I first heard that Blink-182-esque guitar slide in By Surprise’s single ‘Criteria’, or those Green Day-esque palm muted guitars in ‘Wear that Crown’, or even the ‘El Scorcho’ echoing climax of final track ‘Way to be Tall’, and I was instantly reminded of my pop-punk loving former self, it instantly became obvious that there was a risk that the band’s music could be enjoyed based purely on association, and without a focus on it in its own right. One needs to be realistic when determining quality.
And when you really look into By Surprise’s sound, the band’s genius begins to really reveal itself. While they wear their influences on their sleeve, they then rolls these sleeves up and add in something different. The aforementioned pop-punk signifiers are defamiliarised by the band’s sound being foregrounded with jangly Smiths-esque guitars, pounding driven bass lines, and inventive lyrical themes about death that stray from the whole ‘boy/girls are dicks’ thing. The result is truly enjoyable, and, given some more time and exposure, By Surprise will create a sound that they can truly define themselves by.
It’s a shame there’s only three songs really. After my initial self-doubt, it can safely be said that the band are not just a boring, revivalist, carbon copy; they know what they are doing and they are doing it well. By Surprise are more like Bernard Matthew’s turkey dinosaurs, which are still lush, than Crispy Pancakes.
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