Pitchfork

I wonder how Trevor Keith felt when he committed his pipes to the lines, "What could a businessman ever want more/ Than to have us sucking in his store?/ We owe you nothing/ You have no control/ You are not what you own." The Face to Face frontman dives into Fugazi's rant, "Merchandise," without even a slight trace of irony. Does Keith recall his brief stint of sucking The Man's ass when he and his Faces were signed to A&M? Or, does he sleep better, now that he's back on an indie, doing his penance by covering a band with far more anti-corporate credibility than his own?

Though I question his motives, ultimately, I just don't care. I'll admit, I've even been wooed by a few Face to Face tracks in my day; the summer of 2000 single "Disappointed" was the deepest and darkest of my guilty pleasures. Even so, I'm being generous when I say that Face to Face succeed in providing ear candy for the future hard-of-hearing. What this boils down to for a sometimes-cranky music reviewer on a more-than-surly website is that Face to Face have all the makings of proverbial whipping boys. And, if the band is an easy target, a covers record by that band is even easier.

That said, Standards and Practices is the epitome of the pointless record. At its best, it's innocuous, with a straight-ahead approach to the benchmarks of punk and new wave that influenced the band. Face to Face's treatment of songs like Jawbreaker's "Chesterfield King," Sugar's "Helpless," and the Psychedelic Furs' "Heaven" is, in a word, uncanny. Surprisingly, the pop-punk aesthetic is toned down on the latter two; instead of going for the obvious powerful pump-ups, they take the moderately obvious cookie-cutter approach. But if Standards and Practices is to be commended for anything, it's that it doesn't completely massacre the Pogues' "Sunny Side of the Street."

The record turns infuriating, though, when Face to Face alter the originals. In most cases, for a cover to be a successful, slight tension should exist between the original and the band's revamp; its source should at least be respected on some level. But Face to Face gnawed off far more than they could possibly ever chew with a few of these tracks, most notably the aforementioned "Merchandise" and their abhorrent cover of the Jam's "That's Entertainment."

Muddled political implications aside, "Merchandise," Face to Face-style, just isn't musically sound. The original successfully skirted infectiousness with its slightly off-kilter, and vaguely inaccessible melody and execution. Face to Face are quite clearly no Fugazi, and end up injecting the track with a dose of unnecessary poppiness. "That's Entertainment" starts off faithful to the original's stripped-down, acoustic feel, but turns grandiose when these guys introduce drums and a faster tempo to the dynamic. Here, the band uses their pop-punk persuasion as a crutch to get them through a song that requires more than they can pull off.

Most mysterious is why the hell Face to Face ever decided to make such a record in the first place. It reportedly took them a week to record, though it's hard to believe that they spent any more time on it than the 32-minute running length. Maybe the guys were going for a one-two punch of hitting the fans with a few classic tracks while delivering a "new" record. Maybe each member had a burning desire to (deficiently) pay homage to his heroes. Maybe they're just greedy. Regardless, Standards and Practices is a messy assemblage of tunes best left untouched by three-chorders.