New Found Glory - Not Without A Fight Review

New Found Glory goes into its eighth studio album, "Not Without a Fight," with its dukes understandably up. The Florida quintet parted with Geffen Records after 2006's "Coming Home" and spent the intervening years revisiting its favorite film soundtrack songs ("From the Screen to Your Stereo Part II") and having some fun with its alter ego International Superheroes of Hardcore ("Tip of the Iceberg/ Takin' It Ova!"). So the stakes are high as the group's Epitaph debut seeks to re-establish it as the band that reeled off three consecutive gold albums earlier in the decade. With Blink-182/+44 bassist Mark Hoppus producing, "Fight" does pack a wallop, enveloping frontman Jordan Pundik's angsty relationship paeans on a dozen compact, dynamic and hooky tracks in a mere 35 minutes. The full-on "This Isn't You" and the ringing, tuneful "Tangled Up" are the standouts, but NFG also scores with the galloping "Listen to Your Friends," the rhythmic punch of "Don't Let Her Pull You Down," the twisting guitar signature in "I'll Never Love Again" and the rich acoustic-electric mix of "Reasons." —Gary Graff...full text After a lengthy major-label stint that turned New Found Glory into one of the biggest bands on the supersaturated pop-punk scene, this Florida fivesome has returned to Indieville for its new studio disc, which Epitaph boss Brett Gurewitz has said he agreed to release before the group had even recorded a single note.

Of course, such commitments carry little risk when you're dealing with a known quantity, and the members of New Found Glory have never given any indication that they're dissatisfied with their creative cubbyhole. Unlike the recent Epitaph debut by Thursday, another major-label refugee, "Not Without a Fight" is far from an artistic bloodletting; these guys sound more enthused than ever about their three favorite chords....full text Not Without a Fight arrives in early 2009, a year in which the intersection between pop-punk and emo-pop has become impossibly crowded by young, fresh-faced bands looking to funnel their adolescence into hit records. Pitted against that sort of youthful energy, New Found Glory runs the risk of appearing far too old to play this sort of music, the bulk of which caters to teenaged audiences in the first place. Not Without a Fight is par for the pop-punk course, however, receiving a boost from producer Mark Hoppus (who, at the age of 30, was still wooing high-school students with blink-182) and the mature performance of frontman Jordan Pundik, who sounds considerably less nasal here than on previous records. Unrequited love is still Pundik's subject of choice, and he peppers the songs with angry allusions to breakup letters, broken hearts, and unanswered phone calls. Unlike his younger pop-punk contemporaries, though, Pundik no longer seems smitten with the idea of a happy relationship; there are precious few traces of the urgent, here's-to-the-night ethos that other groups champion so heartily. There are also precious few singles here, with nothing approaching the radio-geared playability of "My Friends Over You" -- although "Listen to Your Friends," with its syncopated guitars and ever-present harmonies, does come close. Taken as a whole, Not Without a Fight is a pleasant listen, mature in its outlook, and happily adolescent in its vigor....full text