Chixdiggit!

Safeways Here We Come EP

It’s no secret to the underground that late-’90s-style pop-punk has really come back into vogue over the past few years. However, the exhumation of short, sad, silly songs about girls came at a time when Auto-Tuning vocals and quantizing drums was the norm in pop world. The result is a slew of albums that have a sterile sheen over the raw fun and emotion that made this music break into the mainstream in the first place.

Enter Chixdiggit!. The under-appreciated Canadian pop-punkers seem to have risen from a long period of dormancy to teach the new school what it’s all about: short, sad, silly songs about girls from the heart, not the brain. Clocking in under 17 minutes, there isn’t an ounce of filler on this fantastic EP. Singer KJ Jansen joyously belts out a torrent of catchy melodies over a rhythm section that harkens back to later Descendents, and instead of sounding like studio magic, it feels like a band that have actually learned how to play together and enjoy it.

While there isn’t an enormous spectrum musically or lyrically, the record moves fast enough that it never gets stale. Where a lesser band would sound stupid playing a song titled “Hot N Horny” (“I’m hot and horny in Calgary/And I’m ready to fuck tonight/Ready to fuck tonight/Ready to fuck tonight”) Chixdiggit! pull off the fun vibe so well that even the most jaded ex-punkers would have to smile. With Safeways Here We Come, Chixdiggit! have released a record akin to Superchunk’s Majesty Shredding; a band who never quite broke up seemingly come back from the dead with not only some of their strongest material to date, but also some of the strongest that the genre has seen.

Fat Wreck Chords http://www.fatwreck.com

“Swedish Rat”