Every memory I have of listening to Digger's "Boy Toy Days" involves highway driving on a beautiful summer afternoon with my windows down and my volume up. My iTunes shuffle feature, which seems to always find the most awful grindcore songs when I just want to relax and listen to music, pulled this one out.

Digger was a pop punk band that was more punk than pop and whose song writing and ideas always seemed to be slightly shortchanged by their recording budget or technical limitations, although it's really hard to tell to what extent the latter had an influence. I always thought there was something charming about that, something really infatuating about a low-fi recording of great songs. Usually, when you see those bands live, the place goes wild. Everyone's been waiting for a chance to hear those tracks without budgetary limitations and sometimes those shows can be amazingly electric.

When I saw Digger play the day I got my driver's license the show wasn't so electric. They played their hearts out to a half full Fireside Bowl, but people weren't blown away. That show is always contrasted in my mind with the Alkaline Trio set I saw the next day where it may have been too crowded to open the door to the bathroom. Comparing those two shows and those two bands says a lot about the emerging trends in popular punk rock at the time and kind of the eventual changing of the guard from pop punk to pop emo (has there ever been a word misused so often?).

I sometimes wonder if a band like Digger could be popular now and then I wonder if Digger was ever really popular. I guess it doesn't matter though. "Boy Toy Days" is still great.

"Boy Toy Days" - Powerbait