This is Sam’s weekly column where he writes about a band he likes and tries to make the punk tag bigger in the sidebar tag cloud. Noble pursuits, dude.

Holy shit you have no idea how hard it is to find pictures of a band named “Virgins”. First of all, they’re not the only one. Secondly, that doesn’t even matter because you’ll never find a picture of either on this damned perv-web. Even searching for some combination of “virgins” and “fest 7″, where I first saw the band, gave me nothing but pictures of Oasis at this year’s Virgin Fest in Toronto. So that’s my day. This is a picture of Sam Johnson, the band’s singer guy, shouting around in his old band, New Mexican Disaster Squad. But just imagine he’s playing slightly more melodic pop-punk-cum-classic-hardcore instead of full-speed-ahead ’80s hardcore, and it will work just fine for you.

So Virgins is Sam’s post-NMDS band, and, not surprisingly, they rule. Where NMDS sounded like Black Flag, Virgins kind of sound like None More Black covering the first half of Minor Threat’s discography. I loved NMDS, and I think it’s even better. Because I just love pop-punk that doesn’t make me feel wimpy. Their debut full-length, Miscarriage, is a 1000% awesome songs recorded by the guy from Lords, so you know it sounds spacious and dirty. It’s got songs about how Religious America is crazy and how Jim Jones was crazy. It’s fast and it’s catchy and it’s gritty and it’s occasionally heavy but not in a real heavy way more just in the sense that it’s got guitars and a bass and drums and is infused with a love of the Damned who I guess weren’t that heavy but whatever it’s awesome all the time.