Produced by Mark Hoppus of Blink-182 fame, the new record from pop-punk band Motion City Soundtrack, "My Dinosaur Life", is to be released on January the 19th.  The whole album is currently available for streaming on their MySpace page, but I’ll be reviewing the track "Her Words Destroyed My Planet" today.

If you go into this track expecting Motion City Soundtrack to reinvent the metaphorical pop-punk "wheel", you’ll be sorely disappointed. Even their "new style" doesn’t seem that much different to the work on "Even If It Kills Me", albeit the lack of dominating synthesizers, which I must say on the whole is an improvement. Though they can be used to good effect, I found them to get on my nerves more often than not. But I digress. Despite the fact "Her Words…" isn’t anything revolutionary, it’s not a bad effort for what they’re trying to do.

From what I’d read about Hoppus working with the band, I had a lot of hope for a more refined sound and maybe something a bit more outside their comfort zone. I guess maybe it is, but to me it just seems like a small step for the band when I was hoping for something a bit more ambitious. However this is just one track from a whole album, it could very likely be a bad indicator on which to judge the remaining tracks, both stylistically and in terms of quality. Time will tell. Strong fans of the band will no doubt love this track, and it may introduce some new people to the band. But for me, I’m currently doubting any longevity I had previously hoped for.

Score: 4/10

Grab a free download from Spinner here.

The photo was found on the Motion City Soundtrack Wikipedia page, is by Rwiggum, and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.