Choked Up - Dichoso Corazon [CD]

A debut full-length featuring eleven songs of scrappy, lovesick pop punk. Not exactly sloppy, but definitely not clean and polished either. Songs like “Home” and “Last Night at Hey Queen!” have a familiar ’90s East Bay pop punk feeling with some solid rounds of whoa-ohs. The lyrics are mostly in English, with a handful of songs in Spanish—I wish I knew what more of them were, but the words are printed at about a .5-point font size and it’s just not going to happen for me. The lines I can make out are mainly about crushing on cute queers against a backdrop of fascist dystopia. Cristy Road’s signature melodic snarl brings it all together; this is a fun and fierce first album. –Indiana Laub (Razorcake)