Hurtling out of the speakers in a blur of drums and raucous fretwork 'Angels And Western Waves' sets the tone for fifteen full throttle skate punk tunes, laying claim to some pacey melodic songs laden with hardcore punk but with a quite melodic edge and a whole host of instruments thrown in for good measure.

These Hamburg based lads locked themselves away in a windowless basement to create 'Entertain Me' and you can see they're focused on the job at hand. On 'Mike' they skank and speed in a way that brought fame and riches to many bands before them like Less Than Jake and even bands like Blink 182 and obviously NOFX are in here as well. Tackling subjects such as mass media saturation and the dumbing down of popular TV and even modern youth culture and their damning of the German coalition government gets covered. You can see that the band have one eye on a very big market where they can get their message across and the playing is skintight whether they be ska skanking like on 'Backbite' or just going for the jugular on 'Doin' Fine'.

For me wading through fifteen songs I found it a little tough. Not being a fan of Blink nor Fat Mike's mob a lot of this tends to pass me by but you can see these boys can play and when they hit the spot it is definitely entertaining; 'Cassandra' is pretty decent as is a lot of this album but only being pretty decent isn't quite enough for me. 'Zombie Shuffle' took me a bit by surprise, being sung in their native tongue is a bit of a novelty and not being able to speak German I have absolutely no clue as to what message they're trying to put across but the music is pretty good and the trumpet works well. 'Living Dead' is a pastiche of something Rancid do very well on the verses but maybe not the chorus and then to follow that with more ska trumpets and guitar skanking on 'Radio Sux' I must admit the sentiment is something I wholeheartedly agree with.

With the right backing I'm sure Goodbye Jersey can and will do very well for themselves but a band that sound like they might go down a lot better live than on record or maybe just shave off a third of the tracks on offer here to a much more palatable lengthed album might have been a better idea but, hey ho, it's out there now and too late for regrets. The skate punk fraternity have a new band to get down with. Good luck to Goodbye Jersey, I hope you enjoy the ride.

www.myspace.com/goodbyejersey