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Sunday, December 27, 2009

Four Year plan

BILL GREENE/GLOBE STAFF Four Year Strong - (from left) Joe Weiss, Dan O’Connor, Jake Massucco, Alan Day, and Josh Lyford - comes home to Worcester this weekend.
With an explosive pop-punk sound and sharply honed live show, the Worcester band Four Year Strong has spent the past two years crisscrossing this country and invading Europe to pick up bundles of fans one concert at a time.

Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz happened to be one of those fans. His Decaydance imprint, part of the massive Universal Music Group, inked a deal with Four Year Strong and is releasing the band’s “Enemy of the World’’ early next year.

“FYS reminded me of Fall Out Boy during ‘Take This to Your Grave,’ only version 2.0,’’ Wentz said by e-mail when asked about his interest in Four Year Strong. “They are raw. They are authentic. They get in the van and sweat out every single fan. I love it and back it. . . . Besides, they can grow beards. Most of our bands can’t.’’

Four Year Strong’s songs are radio-friendly, yet the band has gotten this far with virtually no mainstream airplay. Nor was the band’s break out of Worcester particularly conventional.

FYS did not play countless band battles. It did not plug into the city’s network of nightclubs (a couple of the guys even ’fessed up to never having seen a show at Worcester’s fabled Ralph’s Diner, much less playing one there). It did not chip in songs to any of the CD compilations that area bands cranked out as promotional devices. And in the process it never got stuck in the rut that the vast majority of bands fall into in trying to get out of their own backyards.

Yet it’s not that Four Year Strong felt above it all.

“We weren’t old enough to play in clubs, and our friends couldn’t get into clubs,’’ explained bassist Joe Weiss. “We played places that were all-ages, so our friends could get in.’’

Three of the five band members attended the city’s Doherty High School, and the other two filtered in from different bands playing in Worcester’s bustling local music scene. Guitarists and singers Alan Day and Dan O’Connor and drummer Jake Massucco got the band going in 2001 while still in high school. Keyboard player Josh Lyford and Weiss were on board by the time the band made “Rise or Die Trying,’’ its breakthrough recording on I Surrender records, which has sold 50,000 copies.

“When we signed with I Surrender, the stars aligned,’’ Lyford said. “They were small; we were small. But everyone was willing to work really hard, and nobody was afraid of bigger bands and bigger labels.’’

Even before signing to I Surrender, Four Year Strong had a work ethic to go along with its distinctive hard-core-meets-pop sound.

“The live show is it,’’ Day said. “We practiced every day. We treated it like a job because we didn’t want to get real jobs.’’

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