Brat Pack
Hate the Neighbours

THE REVIEW

If you proceed straight ahead (more or less) from the flower market towards the center of Amsterdam looking for the largest flea market, the Waterlooplain Markt, you're almost certainly going to get lost; but even if you don't make it there, just wandering around, sooner or later you'll stumble upon some stalls selling used stuff anyway. Among the usual unusable things, beer mugs from brands you've never heard of or maybe never even existed, and little dictionary books of "Dutch Language" that now have a popularity roughly equivalent to ancient Sanskrit, you might even find a CD.

I happened to come across this "Hate The Neighbours" by the Brat Pack, a quintet hailing from Nijmegen, a Dutch city near the German border.

The album had all the prerequisites for being a flop: a fairly teenage cover more suitable for a student party flyer; a title so original that once read, at least four other songs made up of the same words immediately come to mind; the name of the band: never heard of it; the release year (2008), a number which, associated with the stall owner's explanation from which I manage to grasp "punk", would make you want to put the CD back and buy a (um... that is, another...) T-shirt with the typical herring.

But that morning, the Brat Pack album had decided to be mine and showcased its two aces in the hole. First of all, it was a burned copy and I, to tell the truth, am somewhat against original CDs. Therefore, it cost 1.5 Euros. Taken.

And once at home, the surprise: this record is really good!

13 tracks for about 26 minutes, a punk that seems to have been fished out from the '80s with vague influences of Minor Threat and R.K.L.. Dirty sounds, tracks that more or less all stay on the same level, from the impetuous opener "Sick Burn", to the instantly catchy chorus of the title track, to the nice choruses of the closing "See If We Care", passing through the beautiful "Shadows", in my opinion the gem of the album.

See, it's worth taking a plunge and buying something from these little stalls? Then, for another Euro and a half, I also got a strategy PC game with instructions only in Polish, that's part of the risk...