Find out what the CL Music Team is jamming to rocket launch the work week. Click here to check out previous entries.

Ray – Dikembe, Broad Shoulders (2012)
When fellow CL Music team member Nicole Kibert suggested that Orlando punks You Blew It! play an upcoming anniversary show for Suburban Apologist (another website that I contribute to), I was led down a punk-pop wormhole that I hadn't entered in more than a half-decade. It's not that I intentionally avoided listening to the crunchy guitars, double bass, and infectious melodies delivered in heart aching fashion – I'd just become entrenched in other genres. Enter Dikembe. The Gainesville-based outfit's Chicago Bowls EP developed enough of a following to be pressed to 7" vinyl by Carolina-based label Tiny Engines (song titles on Bowls included “Scottie Spliffen” and “Luc Bongley”), and their 2012 full-length debut, Broad Shoulders, was one the year's best.

Sure, frontman Steven Gray’s vocal has been compared to that of Kenny Vasoli from emo darlings The Starting Line, but Gray & Co. go places that TSL never even touched. There's a palpable passion running through the veins of songs like “We Could Become River Rats,” “Librarians Kill For That Kind Of Quiet,” and “Apology Not Fucking Accepted.” It’s a solid LP right from the quiet opener “Nothing. Stuff” all the way to the feedback-laden, half-time outro of album bookend “Sorry I Can’t Stick Around,” and the perfect jumpstart to the workweek.

This article appears in Jan 17-23, 2013.

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