Hellogoodbye

The first thing you'll notice about this poppy-punk quartet from Huntington Beach, Calif., is how much fun they have. Hellogoodbye doodle silly characters on CD covers, sing of crushes on ice cream scooper girls and bounce around to catchy guitars mixed with 80's era video game SFX. Yet, they aren't total goofs, jabbing high school dance themes with an anti-consumerist bent ("Jesse Buy Nothing...Go to Prom Anyways") and oozing sincerity-via-vocoder on the single "Here In Your Arms." They are also serious enough to operate under a DIY aesthetic, handling everything from artwork to recording and merchandising. In 2005, after only one self-titled EP, they had already put together the (text-message titled) DVD OMG HGB DVD ROTFL, exposing footage of their wildly enthusiastic stage show. Next up, their 2006 playfully titled full-length Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs!, which contained re-tweaked versions of songs written and recorded (yet never released) four years earlier. 2006 saw the release of an EP of album re-mixes and the announcement of another DVD that documents their 2006 Warped Tour antics.