It's always hard to know what to expect from an indie punk band, particularly one made up of guys just out of high school and coming from someplace like the oil refinery town of Baytown. As with most things, 95% of all bands tend to be only middling at best, and that goes double for bands still mining the pop-punk genre -- being kids only further deepens the odds. Fortunately, with Wake Me Up or Put Me Out, Last Ride In hint that they might just have the talent and instinct to pull themselves up above the sea of soundalikes out there fighting to be heard.

Going solely by the silly cover art to the goofy pictures inside to the band members' bios on their Website, where they namecheck bands like NOFX, Against Me!, and Blink 182, I'd nearly written these guys off as fluff before even listening to the CD. In the actual music, however, I hear a lot less of the silliness I tend to expect from those bands and more of the heart-on-a-sleeve soul-baring I've come to expect from the much-derided emo scene. And hey, I've got no problem with that -- personally, I tend to find that kind of thing a lot more interesting than goofy puns and poop jokes (particularly when made by guys who're way old enough to know better).

Singer/bassist Shane Hopper's lyrics eschew the dumb teenager humor in favor of bitterly angry musings on life, love, loss, and the nature of being a kid, and they work surprisingly well, especially when paired with the band's Alklaline Trio-esque brand of punk-pop. Adam Brinkley's guitars roar and race like the best parts of Maybe I'll Catch Fire, Hopper's bass thunders along beneath, Jon Davis's drums jump between breakneck hardcore tempos and more modest pop beats, and Hopper's strained voice yelps and howls above it all like it's given up trying to tame the noise and is just along for the ride. And it all works, especially when you can understand what Hopper's singing. When he defiantly yells "This is our youth / And I'll never forget it" at the end of "Less Than Sober," it almost gets me all teary-eyed and yearning for my own long-forgotten teenager-hood.

Last Ride In apparently aren't afraid to experiment a bit with the punk-pop formula, as well, throwing in an acoustic pseudo-reggae track midway through the album ( "Ink Stains"), trying out a Saves The Day-esque sing-song melody in "Healing Chords," and slapping cheery doo-doo-doo-do-do-do backing vocals over Hopper's tortured howls on the album's final "hidden track," to name three interesting little tweaks. The experimentation doesn't always fly, naturally, as with the vocal fade-in/fade-out bit on "Stupid Me" (which just ends up being distracting), but hey, they're trying, and it's good that they don't feel held down by their influences.

Overall, this is a promising start for a very young band from a toxic little city down there on the edge of the Gulf. If they can get heard outside of the Baytown/Houston 'hood, I think they've got a shot -- and apparently the band gets that, too, because they're moving up to Austin sometime this summer. Best of luck to 'em; I hope they can stick it out, because if they can, they might be able to do something really amazing one of these days. (Jeremy Hart // XX/XX/XX)

Well, here I am reviewing H-town band LoneStar PornStar's first CD, after having watched them grow larger and more popular over these last couple of years. Most everyone in the Houston music scene has heard of them by now, with the different awards they have been winning and the large number of live shows they have performed in multiple clubs.

Being that I used to be one of those girls dancing on stage with them and that I then lost touch with them for quite a while, listening to this CD was a fun trek down memory lane. I've rarely danced as much as I did when I went to their shows and now, as I listen to their CD, I can't help but bust a move or two in my living room to this groovy, funk-based, alternative rock sound.

Nowadays they have a DJ in the band (he's not on this CD, though), and I should note that my personal perspective is generally that I don't approve of the addition of DJs to rock bands -- it seems to take the purity away. I was surprised, however, to discover how wrong I was in this instance when I went to a recent LSPS show at Fitzgerald's -- the DJ definitely adds a dynamite effect to their live show.

I've been completely blown away by how the band's grown musically and in stage performance skills (which I hadn't previously thought to be possible). With that in mind -- and considering how impressed I am with their new songs -- I'm wholeheartedly looking forward to their next CD, which I hope is coming soon. (Alicia Crowder // XX/XX/XX)