Second to Last – Vessel

Just over a year after its first release, Second to Last’s next EP release Vessel touches on themes familiar to the band in their crisp, efficient style. The result is a pleasant confessional work that pushes no boundaries but will satisfy fans of other, bigger releases of the genre this year so far.

Though the subject matter and developed, multi-stage progressions provide an emo sensibility to their sound Second to Last is fundamentally pop, and the vocal interplay between vocalists Tyson Evans and Pat Mays put it under the Taking Back Sunday and Midtown umbrella. Sadly, their ideas don’t quite add up – “Cheap Sleep” and much of “Turmoil” seem spent casting aspersions on a world “content with vices” despite the band’s erstwhile concern with girls and “blowing mad trees.” The album shines best on “Feels the Same,” a eulogy for an era that gave birth to the kind of mid-nineties punk to which Second to Last best compares.

The measured and effective guitar-bass weaving would be par for the course for a band with a little more of a discography behind them and rank as impressive on a group that is, at least on paper, younger than one may expect from their sound. While EPs are commonly regarded as conceptual playgrounds Second to Last jams this one full of ideas, possibly inviting the question of why they haven’t yet released a lengthier, fuller work.

So far the group’s work has been self-serious and intense, as contrasted with its forebears who at least make passing reference to the lighter fare of the teenage years. Perhaps it’s because we live in a time when punk no longer holds claim to the skateboard, or perhaps Second to Last simply has bigger things on their minds than partying, but for a group that so strongly conjures mid-life Blink 182 and TBS, the lighter half of the emotional spectrum is almost wholly absent from their lexicon thus far. Ultimately it’s clear this group is poised to release a better-developed, more balanced full-length album sometime in the future.

The Vessel EP accomplishes a lot in not a lot of time, a promising sign if ever there was one for the new school of old-school punk.