Album Review: LeetStreet Boys debut album – …Yeah, I like this album.
No, really. It’s not that bad.
Yeah, the lyricism is really isn’t any form of poetic mastery.
Yeah, the vocals are silly and ‘tuned enough to give 100 gecs a run for their money.
Yeah, the production is incredibly outdated and ‘cheap’ sounding, and the preset Reason drumkit certainly threw me for a loop.
With that being said, despite its flaws in its mixing and production, I think this is a perfectly solid pop-punk album with a fairly unique presentation and a pretty fun energy. Tracks like “Masquerade” and “Yuri The Only One” get stuck in my head constantly, the guitar-work in “Guitar Hero Hero” blew me away when I first heard it and even still impresses me way more than it should, “LeetStreet Fighter” manages to amusingly fluctuate between being hilarious and badass, and even inspired me to throw a nu-metal track on my own album.
“Fanboy of the Opera” threw me for a loop and I was not expecting the church organs and Visual Kei-esque drama at all, and I found the FF7-esque string orchestration on tracks like “Haruhi” and the aforementioned “Masquerade” to be an interesting touch that sets this apart from a lot of power-pop from the time. The synthier stuff like “Pixel Girl” and “Rockstar Games” (the latter of which being a fun track that made me burst out laughing when I first heard it, “TEACHER SAYS MY HEAD’S NOT RIGHT ONE DAY I’M GONNA SNAP AND PULL A COUNTER-STRIKE” lmao nice) is a lot of fun and I find the sparkly chiptune synths to be a very unique part of their sound. In “Another Time” is a pretty stand-out track and I thought it wrapped up the experience fairly nicely, with the more subtle (yet still incredibly nerdy) lyricism working really well within its favor.
I also fail to see the “misogyny” in any of the lyricism. Pop-punk is pretty widely known for childish lyrics about love and petty romance. The execution of it on this album doesn’t exactly read to me as “misogynistic” at all and if anything I find it’s a lot less harsh and belittling than some of the lyricism off more widely accepted staples of the genre, like Blink-182’s Enema of the State.
I personally thought LeetStreet Boys’ self-titled debut was a fun experience. I found myself laughing with the band a lot more than I would laugh at the band. I think if you appreciate the silliness, absurdity and innocence of nerd/otaku culture in the late-2000s and the dorky lyricism of Nerf Herder, you’ll like this album a lot.
4.5/5 – priceless like a PS3 (and references more games than the PS3 has)
