Ocean Avenue

Never heard of this band before, not sure what to expect by the cover. Ohhh it's emo-ish punk. There hasn't been that much of this thrown around on this site. It's catchy enough. Update: the full album was a bit too much of the same for me, but I'm still gonna give it a 4/5.

Rating: 9/10 Best songs: Way away, Breathing, Empty apartment, Life of a salesman, Miles apart, Believe, Ocean avenue

This must be how it felt being a teen in 2003 5

Don't really love this sort of punk-pop sound. It's okay, just not my thing. 3 stars.

I wasn't fully conscious yet when this album dropped, yet I still realize it as a perfect time capsule of what was going on in early-aughts rock. The not-quite-grunge but still in-your-face guitar, the overly emotional lyricism that's a little cringey, the sheer gloss of overproduction... takes me right back to what was on pop/rock radio when I was a kid. Listening back now, this LP has held up surprisingly well – it definitely starts to lose steam and repeat itself near the end, but the energy is undeniable and the band doesn't take themself too seriously which helps. Regardless of what you may think of this album, this feels like an important add on the music history side of things and covers a gap that's been missing here for a while.

Ref!! Have a word!

A nice punk pop album with very catchy tunes. Sometimes it is just too poppy and commercial sounding ("Miles Apart") and the songs are fine, but not great. Several tracks with violin and even country ("View from Heaven") are incorporated and seem to fit seamless with the more common sounding tunes.

Throwback to my teenage years! The pop-punk with the violin makes for a recognizable sound. Love it!

Pop punk until I die

This is one of the most important albums in my musical journey

I didn't really get into Yellowcard until their farewell tour around 2017; I'd seen them co-headline with Less Than Jake not long before that and then got right into them at a time a) they disappeared and b) when I was much older than their original target audience, yet everyone who listens to them is around my age anyway. They came back and toured Ocean Avenue as a whole album earlier in the year and it was a top show for a top album, albeit one that isn't my favourite Yellowcard record (that honour belongs to Paper Walls). This, however, is top pop-punk early 200s stuff, a load of catchy hooks, just enough emo to get you in the feels, and absolutely spectacular drumming from Longineu Parsons III (Sean absolutely slays on the violin in the big songs too). Way Away opens the album but is one of their best live show closers, full of energy, the title track is an all-timer for singalong shoutiness, Only One similarly, Believe is a nice standalone tribute to 9/11 if that's your lookout but has a broader quality to it that resonates with me (I have a poster of some of the lyrics up in my office in front of me as I type this). Some of the slower/acoustic numbers work well although they're never my favourites (One Year Six Months is a skippable track for me, View from Heaven similarly). Anyway, I listen to tracks off this most weeks and it's as good now as it was then, for everything it's given me and for how much I enjoy it it's an easy 5/5. I'm gonna have a Yellowcard day now.

Good early 2000s emocore album

Pop punk perfection

Catchy poppy punk that I enjoyed. The fiddling in some of the songs made them a bit different in a way that I really liked!

Representative of the era...really clean music

Some vague recollection about this band... maybe one of those ill-considered iTunes ventures where they put music in your library without being asked to? Anyway. Seems fairly typical of the honestly somewhat watered down territory a lot of pop-oriented post-punk/hardcore went, other than the mild innovation of the fiddle player. I didn't hate it, probably wouldn't seek out more.

"punk"

Ocean Avenue the song is one of the best early 2000s songs. Ocean Avenue the album has some good hits but as an album it’s a bit long and can’t live up to the hype of its best songs. Yellowcard at least mixed up the pop punk era with an electric violin. Sometimes it pops up and you wonder how it took so long to be included in pop music. 7.2/10

Classic emo album from the 00’s had this as a teenager, good to listen back but nostalgic reasons only, don’t think it’s held up well over time.

Pop-punk. Ni fu ni fa.

More like a RED CARD for me. I readily recognize that this record is very well executed, that its tracklist is dynamic, that "Only One" is an absolute banger, and that the fiddle is a very original inclusion in the pop punk instrumentation. So is it bad faith on my part to find the whole thing a waste of time? Probably... Yet let's be clear: that sort of act drowning in sugary major chords in the vast majority of their songs -- an act here "compared to Blink 182", and one that has also "toured with Fall Out Boy" -- is like all those other bands in this supposedly "pop punk" subgenre: a sheer betrayal of the true spirit of punk music. Call me a gatekeeper 22 years after the fact, I don't care. Commercialism is not the sin here, by the way -- after all, marketing shenanigans have often been part of the punk phenomenon as well, and this from the very start, in 1977. No, amnesia is the sin here. Superficiality is the sin. Skills are one thing. True soul is another. Which is where I don't feel ashamed about my probable bad faith. Simply put, Yellowcard, just like Blink 42 and Sum 181 and Dross 69, along with all those other similar early ought college bro bands, is to the punk ethos what a beef jerky is to real cuisine. Why should I even bother pinpointing objective qualities in that sort of stuff when none of those acts ever gave back to what they took from so as to make their core audience a little more aware of the very different-yet-manifold *authentic* shapes said punk ethos can also take on -- at least beyond that cheesy pop formula? "Everything is going to be alright!" Yellowcard mindlessly chant on "Believe". No it won't. Not when so many of your airy choruses are so damn formatted and predictable. This is where the pop songwriting chops of this band are also reaching their expectable limits, by the way. If you take out the punk word out of the "pop punk" equation, and simply take the commercial melodicism of this band at face value, you may still end up wondering if any of those songs really have something original to say, at least to a minimum extent. Newsflash: efficient pop songwriting can still be pulled off while thinking out of the box once in a while. It's true. As a matter of fact, this is exactly how pop music at large has evolved from early doo wop to Charli XCX today. So many huge strides, right? I understand that the point of *Ocean Avenue* was never to make such strides, and believe it or not, I can respect that at least. But are we talking about essential albums, or are we not? Let's return to the subject of punk now. As Minutemen's Mike Watt once said, true punk music is never about how fast you can play or how loud you can be. It's about letting your freak flag fly high. Maybe for some fans of this pop punk subgenre, tunes sounding like ad jingles, played by a band having a fiddle here and there, are indeed what letting your freak flag fly high looks like. Good luck with that, more power to you guys, et al. But for me, that sort of thing can only be a mirage. All style no substance. So, sorry user. Enjoy the sun in Florida or California or wherever you are while still listening to this. Yellowcard are releasing a new album in a couple of months by the way... Three or four singles are already out. How you like those apples now? 2.5/5 for the purposes of this list of essential albums, rounded up to 3 (and that's *damn* generous!) 7.5/10 for more general purposes. Number of albums from the original list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 465 Albums from the original list I *might* include in mine later on: 288 Albums from the original list I won't include in mine: 336 ----- Number of albums from the users list I find relevant enough to be mandatory listens: 41 Albums from the users list I *might* select for mine later on: 50 Albums from the users list I won't select for mine: 98 (including this one) --- Émile: voir ma toute dernière réponse sous le disque *Triage* au-dessus...

This was fine. Musically it was pretty solid, if samey-sounding stuff. But I have some sort of generational dislike of this style of vocal that keeps me from enjoying it more. Fave Songs: Breathing, Empty Apartment, Only One, Way Away, Ocean Avenue

September 11, 2025 HL: “Breathing”, “One Year, Six Months”, title track. My sieve of a brain didn’t really take much from this album, though it was good! More punk bands should have a fiddle

I only knew the classic title track, but I really enjoyed the first half of the album - it felt kind of nostalgic. I’m not really a fan of pop-punk in general, but something clicked with me. Was it the violin? Was it the great chorus on “Only One”? Hard to pinpoint. It began falling apart in the second half and from “Inside Out” I was officially out. I still understand the inclusion of something like this.

It’s pop-punk and that’s all I feel that I can say about it. It rides the rims of emo and leaves me with a mid-2000s radio scent in the air - like cloves cigarettes.

Technically proficient yet dull pop-punk.

To paraphrase one of my favourite bands: Stupid lyrics, boring riffs. Every choice is obvious. I hate pop-punk again.