Bouncing Souls

New Jersey's spiritual punks the Bouncing Souls have unwittingly stumbled onto one of the most obvious, yet effective, ways to make a truly amazing album: record/release tracks slowly over the course of a year, compiling them at the end. Such is the case with Ghosts On The Boardwalk, a collection of songs the band issued one-per-month throughout 2009 in support of their 20th anniversary. To maximize a cliché, by these means the quartet were able to separate the wheat from the chaff and realize an incredibly captivating 45 minutes of music. Where albums featuring songs written under duress suffer from filler, not one of these tracks is any less stunning, spiritual or rousing than the last. From the loose, folky twang of "Big Eyes" through the tongue-in-cheek, ripping hardcore on "Badass" and "Never Say Die/When You're Young," with its upbeat, Hopeless Romantic-worthy chant-along deconstructing into a half-time tear-jerker, Ghosts On The Boardwalk is virtually perfect. This is proof that this experiment in revelry has culminated in one of the Souls' best works in their already-vibrant two decades.