Soundtrack Review: NHL 07

I won't forget you...

This is part six of the NHL Soundtrack Project. Here’s where you can find NHL 2002, NHL 2003, NHL 2004, NHL 2005, and NHL 06.

For a series that had generally balanced a handful of big names with a whole lot of smaller artists, EA’s NHL 06 soundtrack was basically the 2005 XXL Freshman Class of skinny white alternative rock bands, featuring future stars Fall Out Boy, Avenged Sevenfold, Bullet for My Valentine, Billy Talent, and OK Go among others. You guys voted it as the best ever, and that’s no surprise considering the sheer amount of memorable songs on that list. NHL 07 is a lot different. With the exception of Protest the Hero, this collection is either short-lived mid-2000s relics or mostly-washed-up 1990s punk bands.

This is also the one with all the emo. In 2006 it seemed like theatrical emotional pop-punk was the wave of the future, as labels scrambled to find their own Fall Out Boy or My Chemical Romance (Where Are Your Boys Tonight by Chris Payne does a good job illustrating this arms race and the reactions of the “old guard” bands to these random newbies popping up with major label support). EA responded in kind, replacing most of the hard rock and metal with contributions from young hot-shot emo bands. The fact that three of these tracks aren’t even on streaming is a decent indication of how well they ended up doing, but the question is, was their stuff any good? And what about the mix of retro-rock, veteran punk acts, and a bit of progressive metalcore that fills out the rest of the soundtrack?

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Anti-Flag - “This is the End for You My Friend”

Anti-Flag was a very political Pittsburgh band that from my understanding was part of the accessible edge of the left wing punk scene between the late 1990s and 2020s, dropping mid albums every two or three years before breaking up in 2023 due to sexual assault allegations against their lead singer. They controversially chose to jump to a major label in 2005, arguing that the platform would allow them greater opportunity to spread the word against the War on Terror, which they did by stuffing their liner notes with essays and writing songs with catchy names like “Depleted Uranium is a War Crime.” I always saw them as basically a cornier version of Bad Religion and Propagandhi, and the lyrics here don’t beat those allegations with boilerplate ranting about TV, commercialism, and the media, culminating in a pretty generic chorus over mid-tempo power chords chugging the infamous “Four Chords” progression. It is catchy, no doubt, and the rhythm of the riff in the verse is pretty solid but that’s about it. This is the only song on this soundtrack that I’ve actually heard in a hockey arena. 5/10

Bloodpit - “Platitude”

Finnish alternative rock band Bloodpit deliver “Platitude,” a dramatic mid-tempo hard rock song that alternates between a moody bass-driven verse and a heavy soaring chorus, with pretty good results. Whoever was in charge of censoring lyrics on NHL 07 really put in some effort, strategically cutting and pasting matching phrases from other verses to cover up their handiwork, and “Platitude” includes one of the examples I found the funniest as a kid: the word “coffin” in “You won’t see me in a coffin” is replaced with a word from the second verse, transforming the line to “You won’t see me in the deep end.” For whatever reason I always pictured this singer as a big bald dude with piercings, so the idea of him being afraid to swim outside the shallow end of the pool cracked me up. Unfortunately I’ve just Googled what he actually looked like, and I’d recommend against it. Anyway, I think the chorus works and I dig the instrumental break in the middle where the drummer cranks up the energy with a speedy tom part. Not a classic by any means but solid. 7/10

Cute is What We Aim For - “There’s a Class for This”

Last week, I wrote that Fall Out Boy’s “Our Lawyers Made Us Change the Name of This Song So We Wouldn’t Get Sued” walks the fine line of cheeky self-awareness and full-on narcissistic self-obsession, but ultimately works. “There’s a Class For This,” the debut single of short-lived MySpace not-to-be emo-pop sensations Cute is What We Aim For, shows what happens when a band tries to do the same thing but absolutely eats shit. Lead singer Shaant Hacikyan no doubt aims for cute but comes off insufferable, with a weak-ass voice sweatily referencing all the drama surrounding his life and winking to all the fans who will surely obsess themselves with it. His attempts at Pete Wentz or Panic! style lyrical cleverness barely make any sense — for example, “You check labels more than the FCC, but these calories are killing me.” Get it, because the girl cares about labels, and the FCC also checks labels(?), and calories appear on food nutritional labels(??), and pop-punk dreamboats like himself have to stay skinny(???). I will give this band two bits of credit on this song: the drum performance is pretty cool and I do like that little guitar hook that plays during the chorus and in the outro. Hacikyan has resurrected CIWWAF a couple times with various different band members, but in my mind the other guys in the band should have done the opposite. The only other thing I have to say about them is that when I was on Yahoo! Messenger back in 2007 you could outfit your avatar in Cute is What We Aim For merch, but there is absolutely zero online record of that having been the case and I wonder how many people actually did it. 3/10

Gatsbys American Dream - “Theatre”

In 2000s pop-punk there were a lot of bands that tried to find a niche for themselves by deviating from the simplistic roots of the genre. It’s easy to think of examples; My Chemical Romance’s theatricality, Fall Out Boy’s creative lyrics, Brand New’s push towards post-hardcore, etc. Gatsbys American Dream (not a typo) did so by experimenting with pretty much every aspect of their music, making a kind of prog-emo filled with literary allusions, weird time signatures, and genre fusions. As you might imagine, this didn’t exactly endear them to the mainstream, but they were a well-respected and reliable touring act who played with pretty much everyone in the mid-2000s. “Theatre” is their most successful song, and packs a lot into less than three minutes. I think there’s a bit of a disconnect between the choppy quality of the vocal performance and the pretty dynamic instrumental which takes plenty of twists and turns throughout the short runtime. Choice lyrics include “tonight the sky is painted melancholy” and “I lust after blood and pain” and “I am I and the world is a woman,” and while the singer is definitely going for it I just don’t know that he has the pipes or swag to pull it off. The musicians get full marks though. 7/10

Good Riddance - “Darkest Days”

If you had this game on Xbox, PS2, or PC, the first thing you saw when you booted up the game was an unreal intro video showing highlights from the 2005-06 season, set to “Darkest Days”:

Good Riddance were a melodic hardcore band who released a string of cult classic records in the 1990s focused on themes of political protest and critiques of American society. You might even say that they were like if Anti-Flag was good. By 2006 they were generally considered to be on the down-swing with the My Republic CD being their last for nine years, but you wouldn’t be able to tell that from “Darkest Days,” a perfectly crafted adrenaline-pumping punk song. The core of the track is excellent but I love all the small touches that help build up the energy, like the sixteenth notes on the hi-hat in the intro, the second guitar part on the verse that comes in on the fourth beat and the reverbed harmonies in the chorus that add a lot of depth to the mix. Great example of using shinier production to elevate a punk song without letting it overwhelm and weaken it. 9/10

Goodnight Nurse - “My Only”

This is our only entry from a New Zealand band. An artist from New Zealand, what, are they friends with Lorde or something? Yeah. Lead singer Joel Little would go on to co-produce and co-write Lorde’s entire first album including “Royals,” as well as songs for Noah Kahan, the Jonas Brothers, Imagine Dragons, Sam Smith, and Niall Horan. My girlfriend informs me that he is also responsible for the four worst Taylor Swift songs. Before all that, he was the leader of extremely-successful-but-only-in-New-Zealand emo-pop institution Goodnight Nurse, and “My Only” is one of seven(!) singles to chart in that country from their Always and Never debut. They made a good go of it by basically automatically opening for every single big pop-punk band to tour New Zealand between 2004 and 2009 before Little decided to go and make a shit ton of money. “My Only” is a quick in-and-out emo-pop track with a catchy but pretty rough vocal performance (with not a trace of Kiwi accent, I have to say) over a competent but not especially exciting instrumental. That seems to be becoming a theme here. I kinda like the guitar break in the middle I guess. 5/10

The Hellacopters - “Bring it On Home”

The Swedish garage rock revival band that isn’t the Hives shows up with a track from their Rock and Roll is Dead album. “Bring it On Home” is quick and simple, a much-needed up-tempo straight-ahead rock track with some enjoyably silly lyrics:

Gimme God and the Holy Ghost
Peanut butter and jelly on toast
Gimme the blood of my enemies
Just give it to me

It’s just two minutes long and provides a nice energy burst. Nothing special, but does the job. The couple bars of 3/4 mixed in are a clever touch. 7/10

HURT - “Unkind”

Genre-hoppers HURT, the best argument I can think of for there to be a sub-genre called art butt rock, made an ambitious go of it once they got signed to Capitol records, putting out back-to-back concept records called Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 that were well-received but got pretty much no commercial success aside from a spot in the A-Team remake trailer. Lyrically, “Unkind” is an achievement in understatement. From my understanding, the speaker’s girlfriend made him commit to celibacy and then slept with a bunch of guys, which made him so upset that he projectile vomited when she told him. From all this, he draws the conclusion that “to me, you’re unkind.” Yeah man, sounds like it. Anyway, there’s some kind of interesting performances and arrangements here but the core song isn’t that compelling and the vocal performance is more silly than heart-tugging. 5/10

Inkwell - “Ecuador is Lovely This Time of Year”

Like I said before, NHL 07 is just as varied as any of the other games we’ve seen so far, with skate-punk, melodic hardcore, post-grunge, throwback rock, etc. But at its core is a set of heart-on-sleeve melodramatic emo songs that bring a different element to the table. I’ve been going on the YouTube pages for each of these songs to embed them into the article, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I’ve seen a lot more genuinely emotional comments on NHL 07 songs than from the other games. “Punk Rock 101” and “Red Flag” bring back memories, but they don’t move me when I hear them; with some of these ones I can’t help but feel a bit of that involuntary nostalgic ache, and it’s by design.

“Ecuador is Lovely This Time of Year,” a track which I’m pretty sure is about a difficult and increasingly strained long-distance relationship, comes to us from Florida’ Inkwell, a short-lived collaboration between the bassist from Of Montreal and the singer of My Hotel Year and seemingly remembered solely by fans of the latter band and people who played NHL 07. None of their work can be found on streaming (at least not in Canada), and barely any is even on YouTube. The song itself progresses nicely with some creative touches like the guitar loop on the verse and a bit of a groove in the pre-chorus, but it’s all about the chorus here, a huge and emotional “Just blame the night!” which as a kid I always thought was “Just play in the night!” This played during the Stanley Cup presentation, a perfect choice. 8/10

Mashlin - “The Shore”

Of all the bands I’ve looked into for this column (with the exception of Floodnine, the basically fictional band featured in NHL 2003), none has had a smaller footprint than Mashlin. No Wikipedia page, 500 monthly Spotify listeners with one song above 2,500 streams, barely any RateYourMusic ratings, and every comment on the YouTube video for “The Shore” is about NHL 07. They got in, licensed a song, and pretty much got out; by 2007 they were broken up. “The Shore” doesn’t lead me to believe they deserved that fate though. It’s a bit simple and over-the-top, but the heart-on-sleeve lyrics and delivery and the constant repetition of “I won’t forget you” probably have a lot to do with the unreal amount of sentimentality and nostalgia you’ll find in those YouTube comments. Like so many of its emo brethren here, the highlight is a big dramatic chorus and I think it lands pretty well. 7/10

Mobile - “Montreal Calling”

Let’s lighten things up a bit. Montreal’s Mobile’s song called “Montreal Calling” is a pretty straight-ahead rock song with some fun and fresh post-punk revival elements and a catchy chorus. I really like the disco beat in the back half of the hook, which along with some other flourishes from drummer Pierre-Marc Hamelin adds a bit of spice to what otherwise isn’t an overly complicated track. The only place it really stumbles is the dramatic bridge, but it catches its feet quickly and bounces to the finish line in fine form. Mobile seemed bound for at least Canadian stardom in 2006, with songs featured in both NHL and FIFA as well as Bon Cop Bad Cop and One Tree Hill, and captured the “Best New Group” Juno in 2007. Unfortunately they just couldn’t make it happen, flaming out with a less successful follow-up in 2008 before quietly reforming in 2023. 7/10

NOFX - “Wolves in Wolves’ Clothing”

The third and final of the ‘90s punk vets on the roster, NOFX was in the midst of dutifully rocking against Bush in the mid-2000s when they dropped Wolves in Wolves’ Clothing, a filler-heavy but generally okay record. The title track is a bit of an outlier in the NHL series, split in half between a laid-back opener and a blazing skate-punk back half. The lyrics are pretty clever, with Fat Mike (memorably shouted out by Bowling For Soup in NHL 2003) speaking from the perspective of a collapsing American Empire, drawing comparisons to Rome, the Aztecs, the pigs in Animal Farm, Marie Antoinette, and a kidney stone. With relatively few bits of censorship (“we are followers of Jimmy Jones cutting in the Kool-Aid line” becomes “we are followers of Mexico Easter Island paradigm”), this is pretty heady stuff for one of these games. I definitely had no idea what a Terry Gilliam film was as a 12 year old. The song itself is very short and a bit slight musically, but it’s solid. 7/10

Pilate - “Barely Listening”

Most of the songs I’ve given raves to in this column, I already knew I loved and have loved for over a decade (or, damn, two). This is one that really surprised me when I went back and listened. Maybe “Barely Listening” doesn’t have the flash or immediacy of other NHL highlights, or maybe its best features didn’t sound the same coming out of my basement’s rummage sale CRT TV, but god damn it sounds great. An atmospheric alternative rock track, it’s driven by a locked-in rhythm section and a minimalist but pitch-perfect guitar part. The mix is spacious and allows each performer to build up the tension as the track develops from bass/drums/keyboards to a chorus bolstered by harmonies and singer Todd Clark’s increasingly intense vocal. When it falls away into a dramatic bridge, a sub-bass rumbles and rattling guitars carry through as the rhythm section builds back up and Clark lets out a Thom Yorke-esque falsetto to launch into the howling final chorus. It really is just a beautifully-orchestrated song, and the only issue is that it ends a bit abruptly. Unfortunately, Pilate — renamed Pilot Speed for one last album before disbanding — were a lot more enamoured with a subdued piano ballad sound akin to Coldplay and Keane and from what I can tell didn’t go to this well again. Ah well. 9/10

Pistolita - “Béni Accident”

The EA team really dug in when they were looking for bands for NHL 07. Pistolita were a piano-emo-rock band on a boutique subsidiary label who put in a bit of time on Warped Tour and opened for Brand New on a few The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me-era shows but ultimately only existed for a couple of years. The lyrics here are… creative, starting with the first verse’s

Would you be willing to strike up a tune
Wrapped in imbalanced pity
Nonsensical madrigal
Wilting with feeling

and continuing with “The bedbugs rest inside a bumblehead(?) on end of kite.” Emo lyricists really thought they were cooking in the mid-2000s. But the thesaurus approach complements the beyond over-the-top theatricality of the vocals and the performances, which peak in a showy instrumental bridge with a fuzz bass solo, clanging piano chords, two separate glissandos, duelling piano-and-guitar tremolos, and somehow plenty more. I can see why these guys couldn’t outduel the more straight-forward and approachable drama of My Chemical Romance or Panic! at the Disco, but it does make for a pretty silly and fun time. 7/10

Priestess - “Talk to Her”

I’ve been ungenerous to straightforward throwback rock n’ roll, and I’m going to be a lot meaner about it in the final two columns here. But look, I’m not made of stone. Like with any genre I’ve talked about, if you can put together a solid and well-crafted piece of work, I’ll enjoy it no matter what kind of baggage I’m bringing to the table. A lot of bands in Montreal’s Priestess’ lane, with their same predictable list of influences (AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin), make corny and boring music. “Talk to Her” doesn’t re-invent the wheel, but it’s not corny or boring. Sure, that rolling riff is dead simple, but it’s just a base for Mikey Heppner’s wide-ranging vocal melodies and electric performance. He’s not doing a Bon Scott or Robert Plant impression, he just sounds great on his own merits, putting strain where there needs to be strain and comfortably jumping around his range. The highlight is the final chorus, where he jumps in half an octave higher than before and closes the track strong. Lyrically, I choose to believe this song is about the other man in “Unkind.”

After getting a minor hit out of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock’s “Lay Down,” Priestess took some time and decided to go prog on final record Prior to the Fire, wearing out the patience of their major label and basically ending the band in the process. If you’d like to learn about that, the Wikipedia page for that album is inexplicably like 10,000 words long. 8/10

Protest the Hero - “Divinity Within”

Whitby, Ontario’s consistent melodic-prog-metal-core band Protest the Hero make their NHL debut with “Divinity Within.” I’ll concede right off the bat that I have a bit of trouble judging this kind of technical metal since it’s not really my thing and I’m not super familiar with most of the genre (and I’m aware that there are probably metalheads reading this laughing at the idea that PTH is in any way inaccessible).

The first half of “Divinity Within” is a frenetic and manic technical showcase of dueling guitars and drums with time signature wankery and all the fun you expect from progressive metal, culminating in a bit about two minutes in where the performers cut in and out in unison. To normie ol’ me, the best part of the track is the second half, where the shredding and blast beats recede, some more conventional structure shows up and a soaring and dramatic vocal brings it all home. It’s a nice bit of order after the chaos of the opening, but I feel like the true fans probably enjoy the fireworks a bit more. My buddy Chris, a diehard fan of the band since Kezia, says the song is a weird fit for an NHL game but that it’s got a lot of the “classic PTH guitar wankery.” It’s good wankery folks. 7/10

Quietdrive - “Rise from the Ashes”

If one of these bands was gonna strike it big like so many of NHL 06’s groups did, it was going to be Quietdrive. Discovered by Will.i.am of all people, Minnesota’s Quietdrive ended up involved in what was likely one of the last major label bidding wars over an emo-pop band, culminating in threatened legal action and a deal with Epic. “Rise from the Ashes” was the first single from their debut When All That’s Left is You (which I’m assuming they got from an online emo album title generator), but it wasn’t their pop hit; like the Ataris from NHL 2004, they also stuffed a 1980s cover — “Time After Time” — deep into the tracklisting of the album at the urging of their label, and you can guess the rest: it was in a WNBA ad and multiple trailers and soundtracks while the rest of the band’s original work was pretty much forgotten. They seemed poised for some kind of success, but like so many late-2000s emo acts they struggled to find footing and eventually broke up in 2014. Their follow-up album received a 58% score on AbsolutePunk.com, pretty devastating since from what I can remember that site rarely gave out anything below a 95%.

“Rise from the Ashes” follows the template we’ve gotten accustomed to here. It launches in with a soaring guitar riff, builds back up with a bass-driven verse, and then delivers a gigantic emotional, soul-bearing chorus. It mostly works for hockey, with an inspiring “I will now rise from the ashes!” hook, although it’s followed up with “don’t call me pretentious,” a charge that could not be credibly levelled against any NHL player. Further to this, in the bridge he repeats a lyric which I’ve seen recorded as “It’s settling,” “Inside of me,” and “Insanity,” but true to form I always just assumed it was “It’s Saturday!” a much better lyric for an NHL game. It’s nothing that special and the verses do have some tough spots vocally, but I gotta give it points for nailing that chorus. 7/10

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Last week I compared the NHL 06 soundtrack to the stacked 2003 NHL Draft. NHL 07 is more like when a contender, let’s call them the Carolina Hurricanes, has a bunch of late picks and spends them on a combination of overagers and high-upside longshots with mixed results. Almost all of the young groups here completely flamed out shortly after appearing in this game, and while it’s not a nice thought, many of them would be pretty much forgotten if it weren’t for having licensed a track to this game. That said, one of the things that drew me to this project in the first place is the idea that you have these bands and songs that would be lost to time but instead hold deep nostalgic value to people (often a generation younger than the artists themselves) who connect them to cherished memories of playing with their friends and siblings and discovering a love for hockey. That’s especially true, I think, of this collection, which happens to include a lot of songs which aren’t necessarily world beaters but have that emotional and longing quality that makes those connections feel even more meaningful.

Let’s get to the superlatives.

Most Valuable Player: “Darkest Days”

Maybe second only to “Red Flag” in terms of songs that feel like they were written specifically to be perfect NHL tracks.

Aleksander Barkov Award: “Barely Listening”

Probably up there for the most underrated songs in the entire series. Glad I revisited this one.

Healthy Scratch: “There’s a Class For This”

more like “cut” is what we aim for. you’re out of here pal.

If you’ve been absolutely seething with rage reading my takes here, you can register your own opinion by following the link below and rating the songs yourself in our community vote:

Rate the NHL 07 Songs

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Next week, NHL 08 brings a clamor and a whisper…