Less Than Jake Bring The Sunshine On New EP

EP REVIEW | LESS THAN JAKE – UNCHARTED by Craig Harston

It’s that time of the year. The days are getting shorter and darker and it’s getting much, much colder! Thankfully, the perpetually sunny ska punk band Less Than Jake are here to bring the sunshine back into our lives.

Less Than Jake have always been a pretty solid band. From their late 90’s thrashy output (1996’s Losing Streak, 1998’s Hello Rockview), through their most popular period (2003’s Anthem) to their late period work as elder statesmen of the ska punk scene (2013’s See The Light, 2020’s Silver Linings), taking a slight detour into more pop punk/emo territory along the way (2006’s In With The Out Crowd), the five piece have always delivered songs for the disenfranchised in a sunny and uplifting way.

Focussing more on quality over quantity in recent years, Uncharted is seven songs that sees Chris DeMakes (guitar, vocals), Roger Lima (bass, vocals), Buddy Shaub (trombone), JR Wasilewski (saxaphone) and Matt Yonker (drums) absolutely firing on all cylinders.

Opener ‘Broken Words’ is an immensely catchy pop punk song, all about overthinking things after the fact, with infectious vocals from Lima, while ‘Walking Pipebomb’ is a superfast skacore song with vocals shared between Lima and DeMakes, this time focussing on how we can often be on the edge of exploding with everything we hold inside (“So hard for me to let it go, I’ve hit my limit, just another minute more of this, might end it all”. ‘Not My Problem’ features a great bassline and horns throughout and goes huge in the choruses, with DeMakes lamenting how easy it can be to lose everything you’ve worked hard for.

Things get heavy and slow on ‘Sunny Side’, a song about how we often show the world a brave face in spite of what’s raging inside us (“I keep my sunny side up and my dirty side down”), and features a riff DeMakes originally wrote around the recording of ‘Anthem’ and a huge stadium rock style bridge. It’s a catchy tune that is sure to go down well live! ‘Dead Days (Over And Over)’ gets a little rockabilly in it’s construction, a relentless assault of guitars, organs, horns and lyrics about moving forward, while EP closer ‘Shake Loose The Truth’ is a straight up punk rock song about picking ourselves up no matter how bad things get, with a truly excellent bridge!

All in all, it’s a great new release from Gainesville’s finest, with the only criticism being that the featured songs are a bit too similar to those found on ‘Silver Linings’ – but a very minor criticism as that is still a banging album!

No matter how dark things get, Less Than Jake will always be here to remind us that summer is just around the corner.

‘Uncharted’ releases on 15th November via Pure Noise Records. Less Than Jake return to UK shores next year for Slam Dunk Festival 2025, with a whole host of early 2000s bands!