22 Sound Records

Reviews:

Hats off to Garrison for sheer creativity: this Boston-area quartet’s secondfull-length Be a Criminal boasts one of the cooler thematic conceptsfor a record in recent memory: a blow-by-blow exploration of criminal intentso tightly wound that it could topple conventional morality like a house ofcards. It took Fyodor Dostoyevsky approximately 550 pages to put Raskolnikovthrough the ethical wringer; Garrison has accomplished almost as much in underhalf an hour, with a wider spectrum of crimes (everything from murder to intellectualtheft), to boot. Garrison’s biggest calling card to date has been the impossiblysmart lyrical instincts of songwriters Joseph Grillo and Ed McNamara, and thatstrength—despite a dramatic shift in tone from light to dark—has remained aconstant on Be a Criminal.

Garrison busts out of the gate on the pulsating opener “Recognize an Opportunity”and maintains the furious boil over the course of the first few tracks (“Chosea Weapon,” “Know the Locale”) with some irony-free meditationson the rubric of transgression. But when the band hits the scene of the crimeon “Focus, Focus, Focus,” the tight rhythm section grabs hold of thereins and speeds the record towards its inevitable—and unapologetic—conclusion.And Garrison couldn’t have found a better fit for a producer than J. Robbins,who practically minted these short, sharp shocks with his work in Jawbox andBurning Airlines. Unfortunately, a lot of the finer points of Grillo and McNamara’ssongwriting have been canceled out by the band’s somewhat lateral approach,one of the standard pitfalls within the increasingly nebulous emo genre. Bea Criminal is smart, perhaps even too smart for its own good, but whereoh where are the hooks? There’s simply not enough sonic variation hereto ultimately validate the record’s otherwise terrific conceit.