Pitchfork

As this album's title makes clear, The Knockout Pills aren't very good at either math or spelling. In the rock 'n' roll classroom, they're the detention-bound misfits in the back row-- ain't concerned with learnin' nothin' but a good time-- and 1+1=Ate, their second full-length, is an album of punk spitballs targeted at the back of your head. They've scrawled "KISS" on all of their notebooks, but their primary allegiance is to Cheap Trick. While fellow pop-punk bands like Sum 41, Good Charlotte, and Blink-182 are wearing their newly found maturity like a school uniform, The Knockout Pills wallow in arrested development, despite the fact that their back-cover photo depicts them as late-thirtysomethings.

Featuring members of the Weird Lovemakers, Los Federales, and The Resonars, The Knockout Pills hail from Tucson, AZ, home of Calexico and Linda Ronstadt. There's no high-desert harmony or Mariachi influence in their sound, though-- these not-so-juvenile delinquents play a brand of pop/punk that could have emanated from any corner of the country. Rock 'n' roll has many universals-- fast tempos, loud guitars, barking vocals, and attitude-- and The Knockout Pills cram them all into 1+1=Ate.

Guitarist Matt Rendon and bassist Travis Spillers trade off yapping vocals throughout the album, and trying to distinguish between them is only slightly less futile than trying to figure out what exactly they're saying. Their indecipherability never becomes a liability; instead, it only reinforces the album's one-take spontaneity and the exuberance of its stay-young mission. A few distinct words even rise from the rumble. On "Stab Wound Baby", they sing about a guy who wanted to be a doctor but instead "now he's comin' home in a box." "Summertown Rundown" laments the Arizonan heat: "We got three more months of 110 degrees."

The dozen songs on 1+1=Ate all start with a prologue that introduces the main guitar riff, settle into a verse/chorus/verse structure, and are punctuated by a shout-along bridge and short guitar solo-- and all of them are over and done within three minutes. The Knockout Pills spruce up the songs with flourishes like the whoa-oh-oh chorus of "Stab Wound Baby" and the barreling piano on "Not for Nothing". And in addition to handclaps and a squealing audience, "Summertown Rundown" layers a surf-guitar solo over falsetto la-la-la's as it leads into a second searing solo. 1+1=Ate may not be exceedingly original, but that doesn't mean it's not inspired-- or that its not good, solid fun.