While Jeff Rosenstock still seems like a young, rising artist, the guy’s actually been chugging along for long enough to have become something of a punk elderstatesman. The former Bomb the Music Industry! frontman was an early, accidental pioneer among indie artists of the internet generation and now, the kids whose minds he blew with his lo-fi basement shows are making their own music. The Rosenstockian sound and ethos are heavily permeating the genre these days. Take Dollar Signs, for example, whose 2015 album saw a cameo from Rosenstock and bassist John DeDomenici, which apparently came about when the band showed up to one of Rosenstock's shows with recording equipment and politely asked the two if they'd like to lay down some tracks.On their new album, This Will Haunt Me, the self-professed “student loan-core” band out of Charlotte, North Carolina, doesn't just take a page out of the Bomb! book, they take an entire chapter. Dollar Signs ride the party punk vibe hard on the record, and embrace their self-deprecating slacker persona with songs like “Waste My Life Away” and its lines “I know that I’m pretty hard to love” and “I like to waste my life away / don’t you waste your time on me.” And it’s all rushed out at a manic pace through singer Erik Button’s breathless delivery.The video for “Waste My Life Away” is acted out by a cast of colorful hand-rod puppets. (For legal reasons, we are unable to call them Muppets™ due to a strict intellectual property trademark.) So anyway, these colorful hand-rod puppets consider a trip to Las Vegas and ask themselves what could possibly go wrong. As anyone who has ever spent their afternoon daydrinking at Punk Rock Bowling and their night gambling at the Golden Nugget can tell you: everything. As you could probably guess, things don’t go well for our colorful hand-rod puppet heroes. (Man, it would be a lot easier to use the M-word.) At one point they get themselves caught in a card counting situation a la Casino and some other stuff happens but, like a trip to Vegas, it gets a little hazy.Watch the video above and pre-order This Will Haunt Me, which is out on July 13, from A-F Records.
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