Sensitively Stringed Soundtrack for a Self-Circumcision

Comments (0) By George Smith Tuesday, Oct 7 2003

Yellowcard's Ocean Avenue clearly has to be in the MP3 player of Matt McNamara, the spoiled son of the sincere plastic surgeon, Sean, on Nip/Tuck. Its fiddle-and-punk of yearning for gone or out-of-reach young love works as background rock for one so distraught by his uncircumcised dick he'd hack himself up from instructions downloaded off the Web. In other words, you can't tell if the kid's stupidly naive due to genetics or because he's been cosseted.

photo: Marissa Kaiser

Newspaper boxes make excellent chairs.

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Yellowcard
Ocean Avenue
Capitol

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"Letting out the noise inside of me . . . every window pane is shattering . . " mutters some Yellowcard member who sounds rather incapable of smashing glass. Most of Ocean Avenue's numbers speak to this flavor of mildly garment-rending frustration. The couple remaining get outside the box with tales of the disappointment that inexorably results from having a traveling salesman for a dad or not being as old as one wishes. Listen long and you'll get nostalgic for Jimmy Gestapo or some other homeless, old-school metro-punk churl trying to chug a hogshead of suds through a funnel.

"Putting violin in a rock song was definitely a great idea," waxes one Yellowcard follower on Amazon. Indeed so—let's not prematurely deprive a new generation of its own Robbie Steinhardt.