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Shooting Blanks’
six-song EP Nuclear Family begins with the song "No One
Knows," and the lyrics go something like this:
Here I go again / I
write the same old type of song / with the same old poppy
lyrics / So you can all sing along / I think I’ll write about
a girl / Since that’s what a lot of people write about these
days
Yes, it’s true. So
many of these Chicago-based punk pop boy bands, whose members
usually sport oversized t-shirts, crew cuts and goatees, are
ever-so-fond of writing about those tank-topped "punk-rock"
girls who go out with them after the Green Day concert to get
matching tattoos. If conformity through mockery was what
Shooting Blanks was going for on "No One Knows," and, overall,
on Nuclear Family, that’s definitely what they
got.
The songs are punchy,
cute and for the most part, tongue-in-cheek. "Britney Spears,"
is a little punk song about the
Mouseketeer-turned-pop-sex-goddess stepping through the
television screen, out of MTV and into the real lives of this
suburban Chicago trio. Grammy material it’s not, but a good
companion to a few cold ones, you bet.
Not that the band has
any delusions of being taken totally seriously. The cover of
the actual CD inside the Shooting Blanks case has a lovely
comic of two drunk spermatozoa swimming around in a neon blue
void, and the band’s website has a pornographic paper doll
function that allows you do defile the band members. Still,
Shooting Blanks gigs regularly around the city and has
ambitions to become, if not an intellectual favorite, at least
the greatest frat house band around. So far they’re doing
well; those paper dolls are a lot more fun than the Kevin
Bacon game – and what Greek doesn’t want Britney Spears to
jump through his television?
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