Reviewed by Dancin' Dave Derbyshire

One-Eighty are a typical ska. swing, punk, pop, surf team from Orange County. Two girls, Kim Tennberg and Madelyn Mendozer, take the lead on vocals as well as playing trumpet and percussion on this album. A group of boys provides the backing. They rattle these songs off at a very fast pace, so much so that before I had managed to follow the words in the album cover, I found that I was listening to the second song. There are 14 songs on the CD. Yet to me it sounded too much like the same beat, the same fast pace, over and over again. Admittedly there are some variations. In "When We First Dated" the pace slows down and speeds up again more than once. The best song was the nearest thing to a title track that this album had "405". This tells the sobering story of a driver who curses some "crackerjack" that cuts them up only to see them crash immediately afterwards. Overall, the lyrics did look promising as they interweaved themes about dating with more spiritual matters. A closer look revealed what I felt were quite mundane platitudes. But then again, it did have a catchy beat.

The opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those held by Cross Rhythms. Any expressed views were accurate at the time of publishing but may or may not reflect the views of the individuals concerned at a later date.

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