Reviews:

Scores of young bands talk about building up word-of-mouth through grassroots marketing, scores of young bands do the dirty work, and scores of young bands are never heard from again. Matchbook Romance are the anomaly. Working Purevolume.com and (the now-defunct) MP3.com as hard as they do their fretboards, the Poughkeepsie quartet managed to convince not just all of their friends to listen up, but all of yours too. Maybe the virtual flyer act worked this time because MR concoct the same kind of forlorn yet infectious postscript to the punk-pop playbook that made Fall Out Boy a pin-up phenomenon. New cut "Monsters" boasts a music box motif, a bar chord ballroom strut and a solo straight out of Prince's "Let's Go Crazy"-elements that would once seem too disparate but fuse effortlessly together in the new pop-punk landscape. The emo-lad sniveling of old has been supplanted with gang-harangue choruses and more subtle stabs at heartwork. Romance is in the air, all right.