f there’s one thing I’ve learned from television and growing up alike, it’s that it’s not easy being green. So, when reviewing Destroy to Create, the debut album from Toronto area punk/ska quartet The Flatliners, I think it’s important to keep from both placating the band, whose mean age is, I believe, below all legal drinking ages in North America outside of Quebec, as well as forgetting the fact that this is their first proper album, and that opening shows for the likes of the Suicide Machines when you’re barely 16 is no small feat.

With the benefit of my ever-present doubt, on first listen the album sounds like the best of what I could have presumed the new Against Me album would bring, before it brought even better. Frontboy Chris Cresswell begins the album with an inspired 30-second dirge of introductory scene-setting. Guitar sludge progresses under Cresswell’s mission statement “We welcome you to our horror show of an event with open hearts and bloody grins / We sing the songs of times to come / And those we’ve come to love / Before everything falls apart / Create.” As the chords give out to a descending guitar riff, the first proper song kicks in, punk rhythm, upstrokes and all.

It’s a solid start to the album, until the chorus charges in, and pop-punk rears its filthy influence. The distorted power chords rudely intruding on “Fred’s Got Slacks”’s groove are an ear sore, and when the drums fill up the overused Blinkish palm mutes, even a line like “Who gives a fuck if he’s a metro-sexual / I know you did cause you’re a hetero-molestico” won’t make me smile for irony’s sake this time. This is a common theme throughout the album; stringing together what would be done best as bare bones songs from a three-piece plus vocals with heavy guitars instead of necessity-driven innovating of the song structures. It’s a tactic that pays off mildly on songs like “My Hands Are Tied,” which features an organ, as well as on “Gullible,” where the first 30 seconds have a stop/start dynamic off a lead guitar riff that leads into Cresswell’s refreshingly high registered harmonies. The latter, however succumbs to the same mediocrity of power chorus’s and repetition.

“Scumpunch!” is pre-ambled by what sounds like a film recording: “Did you kill anybody? A few cops. No real people?” Though Ghandi might not be proud, I’m pretty sure Lars Fredrikson would, and in that case the point is made effectively, however from a critical listening standpoint, I’m not sure if I can appreciate a message that’s so easily antagonistic and volatile, especially from a group of young individuals with such a progressive ideology as a union label group.

The song itself begins the best stretch of the album, and at eight tracks in, it’s fair to say that maybe the recording process becomes easier as the group continues to experiment. “I Am Abandoned,” with its infectious chorus of “Some things will never change / Some things will always stay the same,” inflection on the “always,” showcases some much needed minimal texturing with a long-winded guitar sustain, and “Macoretta Boozer” is tight like a bullet’s path, raging as it progresses with the issue of a friend’s drinking problem. Remember, these kids were definitely still kids when that song was written. This is not your standard cheeky drunk song. These are genuinely matured minds, thinking about the horrors of their generation and the “City of God” state of our prospective existence in another one.

Like any young group stressing over the originality conflict of recording under a label for a specific audience, we have the pleasure of a secret song on Destroy to Create, and following the closing surf riff of “Do or Die” (which plays out to a reprise vaguely familiar to fans of Burn, Piano Island, Burn), Cresswell performs an acoustic song with some of the sweetest melodies on the album.

This band has realized a lot of pop potential, and not to let it overshadow the insistence of their ska aesthetic, it’s hard to imagine a problem with one nixing out the other. There’s a lot of moderation between straight punk and melodic interplay on this album. It’s fair to say that Cresswell’s songwriting has the propensity to lead a legion of growing punk fans in an increasingly stratified Toronto punk scene, and it’ll be interesting to see what kind of rabbits this band can make materialize out of their as yet undersized hat.