There are a few pleasures in life that I like to count on to keep me going: a good veggie burger, the occasional bukkake sesh and a well-crafted pop song are really all ma Daley's little boy needs to keep getting up in the morning. This brings me to Sing It Loud's second full-length release for Epitaph Records, Everything Collide. Sing It Loud are clearly able to provide at least one of those three things with this album: oowee gooey loads of sugary pop songs. It is easy to see why the band was offered a contract from the 'taph after less than two handfuls of shows together.
The record opens up with "Sugar Sweet," which is basically the perfect three-minute, radio-ready pop song; whether you like it or not, after hearing it you'll find yourself singing the chorus "She's sugar sweet, she's all that I need, it's all that I have to hold on. Her angel eyes, her clever disguise, I'm doing all that I can to move on." Although the band hails from Minneapolis, Minn., this song's summery vibe will instantly make you think of the Sunshine State. It would have honestly fit perfectly on the soundtrack to The O.C., cozily between Peter Gallagher's eyebrows. There is this up-tempo shift to the second verse that brings a slight pop-punky feel at just the right moment to keep things from getting stale; it isn't a drastic shift at all, but it shows a band that is really getting to know song dynamics. Like many of the songs collected here, the keyboards of Ben Peterson really act as a glue for the rest of the songwriting, always reserving tasteful tone for whatever feeling the band might be trying to convey.
You aren't going to get any sophisticated lyrical observations about love and life on Everything Collide, but I don't get the feeling that that's the band's intention anyways. Take for example the opening lines to "Here with You": "I stand alone, lost on an empty road. Too many miles beneath my feet have worn into my soles." The words might seem slightly clichéd to anyone that has listened to popular music from the past 70 or so years, but there is a level of honesty conveyed behind them--manufactured or not--that doesn't seem to make it matter, and they never get too ham-fisted either. This is the difference between a band like Sing It Loud and countless other pop-rock acts--Sing It Loud are convincing.
Everything Collide is far from a perfect album: The production and mixing do far too much to highlight the vocals that aren't that impressive to begin with; the lyrics, while always at least decent, haven't found a way to tap into anything personal enough to make a lasting impression with anyone; and the songwriting can come off as a bit mechanical and contrived. Still, these are some legitimately very catchy pop-rock songs that manage to avoid anything overtly misogynistic or negative that a lot of pop bands of Sing It Loud's vintage seem to get caught up in. The band seems to just want the listener to enjoy themselves and sing along and Everything Collide does that, and there is enough potential here to think they might one day transcend their pitfalls to join the ranks of more respected acts like the Format.