MONIKERS - Eat Your Young CDEP (Kiss of Death Records)

American labels like Kiss of Death, Art of the Underground and Whoa-Oh are putting out some brilliant pop-punk at the moment – not pop-punk in the watered down, autotuned, superficial, vacuous Blink 182-clone sense of the word, but proper actual punk music with proper actual poppy melodies. It's like Drive-Thru Records never happened!

My latest find in this world of new old pop-punk is (are?) Monikers, who number among their ranks ex-Discount guitarist Ryan, who sounds like he has been attending Blake Schwarzenbach's Academy of Vocal Training. Musically there is also a touch of a Jawbreakery vibe, but a little more rough around the edges and punked up. Stand-out track 'Mirror Images' could almost be a leftover Discount track, which is also no bad thing.

Five songs, one acoustic, which whizz by in twelve minutes. A short review for a short record, but one that should have a place in any self-respecting pop-punker's record collection. But a warning for the squeamish: the cover of this EP is a graphically literal illustration of its title. Yum yum!