One Flew West, “Trial & Error EP”

Like Pop Rocks in your Emergen-C, pop-punk outfit One Flew West offers a surprise jolt via Longmont’s sleepy music scene. The four-piece knows the rules of its genre: Break in with a riff, smash something (usually a heart) and get out in under three minutes. It pulls that off time and again here, most impressively on its eponymous track, a kiss-off to establishment America and its headlong plunge into idiocracy. The band straddles generations (it’s essentially a revival of All Time Low’s early-aught emo) about as well as it can, even if its only updates are semitopical lyrics (“I want to watch ‘Twin Peaks’ and argue over what the hell it means with you,” as its frontman sings on the saccharine “Out of Time”) and the fact that they wrote these songs now and not 15 years ago. No matter: Every generation needs a band to stoke its angsty screams. Right now, few in Colorado do it better than One Flew West.