As the year progresses and the days get warmer, music lovers begin to collect some new tunes that will keep them occupied throughout the summer months. It takes a little something extra to make a summer album special.
It has to be fast paced, easy to sing along to, and fit to play during days at the beach and long drives. Taking Back Sunday’s Tell All Your Friends set the bar pretty high for the perfect summer album nearly 10 years ago.
Although The Story So Far’s latest album release What You Don’t See doesn’t quite reach that bar, it sure does come close. What You Don’t See is a cathartic, hard-hitting, full-throttle slice of pop-punk that will surely find its way on car stereos everywhere come June.
Musically, this is a pretty straightforward pop-punk album. However, there’s a new level of confidence that seems to push this band to the next level. “The Glass” and “Right Here” emanate urgency from start to finish while “Empty Space” is a little more patient, growing with each chorus.
Of course, there’s nothing too out of the ordinary here, but the band has certainly made strides to enhance the brand of pop-punk that they introduced with 2011’s Under Soil and Dirt.
While there are certainly no clunkers to be found on this record, some songs do tend to stand out more than others. The heart and soul of What You Don’t See is most characterized by the album’s bookend songs and the three center tracks I mentioned earlier. Songs like “Stifled” and “Bad Luck” tend to get lost in the mix.
This is not to say that What You Don’t See is generic. Not in the slightest. In fact, The Story So Far’s lyrics are far better than most others in the genre. Even though they do stick to typical subject matters of relationship problems and the like, there is a more personal, introspective vibe that sets What You Don’t See above Under Soil and Dirt.
“Can’t sever the ties I made/ the knots are strong/ the framework’s laid/ no matter how many things I save/ the tangible will always be what I crave” croons singer Parker Cannon in one of the best vocal performances of the band’s career. With this sophomore full-length album, it seems obvious that The Story So Far are not messing around. From opener “Things I Can’t Change” until the very end, What You Don’t See never slows down. There are no acoustic songs, just 30 minutes of well executed pop-punk anthems.
Critic’s Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Jordan Walsh can be reached at jordan.walsh@spartans.ut.edu.