Written by Spike Sidor

SKA DREAM

Jeff Rosenstock Ska Dream Review Album Cover

JEFF ROSENSTOCK

2021 SKA/YUP ITS SKA

Ska Dream is a re-imagining of Jeff Rosenstock’s great 2020 album NO DREAM, but now it’s ska. It’s as terrifying as it sounds. Complete with genre appropriate new track titles, my personal favorite being NO TIME TO SKANK, an altered album art with checkerboard font and the iconic suited skanker, and if that wasn’t enough it was released by surprise on 4/20. I suppose this makes Ska Dream a joke and yeah it pretty fucking hilarious but its an incredibly high effort gag. I imagine Mr. Rosenstock among a few friends, maybe a little drunk maybe a little high, saying hey wouldn’t re-making no dream as a ska record be a real hoot? Or maybe it started with just a single track, y’know an amusing fling, breaking the old horns out of the closet. Remember when we used to eat and breathe shit like this guys? Good times. Well, forty minutes and thirteen tracks later the monstrosity walks, talks and reminisces about that totally sick Reel Big Fish and Streetlight Manifesto co-headliner it saw in the early 2000s.

This isn’t just the same tracks with brass, it’s a decently sized rebuild, I’m not entirely sure if some guitars are vocals are newly recorded but adding ska horns and bass lines will do that to an album. New tempos akin to the jaunty classics of ska and to turning State Line into a beach bungalow tinged slow burner. I’ll get straight to it, Ska Dream is good, that’s right Ska is good. Sure its built upon the rock solid foundation of an album that was already terrific but this isn’t a fucking re-run, its entirely its own thing, shockingly so. A unique experience from its source, every track is filled with wonderful surprises, even that nasally rap verse on SKrAm. Rosenstock takes the beautiful butterfly that was NO DREAM and morphs it into the black and white checkerboard butterfly we all never knew it could be. Of course I recommend that you listen to NO DREAM first but it’s still enjoyable all on its own. These days there is more than enough shaming and dismissal of ska, as an embarrassing episode of all our coming-of-age tales, relegated to the same space as any number of outdated fads. Nah, screw all that, it was fun then and it’s fun now, nothing changed besides the position of the sticks in peoples asses. I was smiling ear to ear for the full runtime, seriously, give a shot, throw the guilt in guilty pleasure out the window and have some goddamn fun.

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