Do you like your punk rock explosive and exciting? What about punk with a healthy sense of melody? And lastly, do you enjoy punk with choruses to shout your heart out along to? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you’ll want to check out Lost Love and their debut album Sparkles.
The Montreal quartet kicks things off with “Rooftops/Fireworks”, which is explosive, melodic, and delivers on the catchy chorus that was previously alluded to. It also happens to lay down the groundwork for the entire album which generally follows the same structural formula. There’s a moment roughly halfway through “Rooftops/Fireworks” when the band declares “nothing’s left except sincerity”. A simple statement, but it’s a powerful one and could very easily be the album’s motto. Lost Love hasn’t been around for too long, but Sparkles captures them doing what they know how to do best: playing their hearts out.
Which leads me to the most remarkable thing about Sparkles: the originality of the song compositions. Sure, the songs follow an archetypical verse-chorus-verse set up, but Lost Love largely avoids sounding exactly like the bands that (presumably) influenced them. This melodic style of punk rock has been around for at least twenty years (though I’m sure that’s up for debate), so it’s common for today’s bands to take a couple of albums to really find their own groove. However, this isn’t much of a problem for Lost Love. Sparkles fits in comfortably with other punk albums without blatantly mimicking Goddamnit.
Is Sparkles a wholly original punk rock album? Not exactly. Is it a sincere punk rock album from a young, up-and-coming band worth paying attention to? Most definitely. You can give it a listen below.
4 / 5
RIYL: The Draft, The Sainte Catherines, American Steel