They Are Not Saving The Day

Here at Indie Schmarm we often will sit around and rate records on our own for hours going over what a perfect record is and what that means to us so on and so forth. Some perfect records that have been included in these conversations have been In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel, Kid A by Radiohead, Highway 61 by Bob Dylan, Lifted by Bright Eyes, Velvet Underground and Nico, Broken Social Scene’s self titled, Perfect From Now On by Built to Spill, Moon and Antarctica by Modest Mouse, Ys by Joanna Newsom, Astral Weeks by Van Morrison, and you get the idea. Not too long ago I decided to make In Reverie by Saves The Day a perfect record. I still sometimes feel I might have rushed that decision, but I’m sticking to it as of now. It’s one of my favorite produced records as well as having really really solid songs. The influential factor though hasn’t been as high as other past records, so it can be debatable. The old ground zero fans of Saves The Day will tell you that nothing is hardly worth listening to after Through Being Cool and later fans will claim In Reverie is the best record they’ve made and Sound The Alarm is a dip (I am one of those later people, though I still really like Sound The Alarm). Stay What You Are seems to be a good middle ground everyone can agree on for the most part.

We now come to the new material being brought to us by Saves The Day. I doubt anyone can get on board with this new out of no where debacle. No matter what you liked about Saves The Day, for the most part I’d assume people can agree that good music is good music and they still made good music and the lyrics on In Reverie are really good too, whether you like the style of music or his voice is a different matter. Sound The Alarm was still good too lyrically, though not as good, and most of it was extremely raw and intense with lyrics like “I’m dying in the darkness of my mind, I dream I’m setting fire to everything in sight, if I die tonight and go to Hell oh well”…easy Chris, easy now, it’s going to be ok.

I’ve only heard a few songs off this new record Under The Boards coming out October 30th and they were about the level of a girl teenager writing songs for their younger sister’s pop rock record. Some gems include “We are singing with the radio” in one song and “Bye bye baby doll” in another both sung over and over again for choruses. You’ll know what songs they are (surprise surprise) because they are titled “Radio” and “Bye Bye Baby”. Another set of lines goes as follows in another song titled “Get Fucked Up”: “And every time I think about you I get fucked up, it feels like all the stars are falling inside my heart”. I didn’t realize we went back to freshmen year there for a second. Let’s take a moment and soak in this deep meaning in another song: “Go, if you want to go, I dont want to lie here while you cry yourself to sleep. Say, what you want to say, ’cause I can see by your face that somethings not the same.” Hmm, Pierre from Simple Plan must have come in to help Chris through his writers block on that one. Let’s take a moment now to compare that with some of In Reverie. This is just a well put together analogy: “Smell of burning photographs slides slowly to my nostrils I try, remember the soft silence of summer sweating in the evening.” And this: “The monkey will bite, better eat your poultry til’ there’s no use, don’t try to ask a doctor what’s going on inside your head, just fall in line like all good soldiers do.” Just solid and well thought out. Even his old stuff, though tailored to heart-break more, still was ok and fit the time the songs were written. Regardless, the music itself held up even if lyrics didn’t at times, which they did anyway for the most part.

If you aren’t a lyric guy like I have come to be sometimes to my own demise, musically Under The Boards itself is pretty dry and feels very emotionless and just a copy of their older stuff. There’s SOME sorta cool guitar stuff, but hardly any. There’s not much dynamic to the songs and it sounds like they threw together some songs because the label was pressuring them or something. I am pretty disappointed overall and I probably wont end up buying it seeing as I can hear it online for free right now anyway, and once has been enough. Well, that’s my rant for the day. Perhaps one day I’ll consider actually giving the record a listen. For now I have In Reverie and the others to snuggle with at night.

End Scene,
Dan Tana