Catch 22

If you didn't know ahead of time that Catch Twenty Two was a ska-punk band, you wouldn't guess it based on the opening tracks on its fourth album. "Rocky" has horns and crunchy guitars, sure, but vocalist Ryan Eldred sounds an awful lot like Elvis Costello on the song's first couple of lines, and the rest of the song rocks in a perfectly foursquare, straight-ahead way. "Beguile the Time," on the other hand, swings along in a jaunty 6/8 time, with swelling, slightly Latin-tinged horns. Not until the nicely hooky "Wine Stained Lips" do the horns and guitars start doing that hocketing, offbeat thing, and it's all the more effective for coming in late in the game. On "Good Times," the feeling is straight-up ska, and that turns out to be one of the best songs on the album, beat out only by the complicated, but danceable, "Chin Up." This particular brand of ska was almost ruined by no-talent bandwagon-jumpers back in the mid-'90s, but Catch Twenty Two continues to prove that the patient still has some life left. Recommended.