Sing It Loud – Everything Collide

With their sophomore full length, Everything Collide, Minneapolis pop punks Sing it Loud seem to have at least listened to their harshest critics.  Founded on the assumed popularity of the juvenile premise of goofy hair and obnoxiously overpowering snyth pop, the quintet now seems intent on taming their annoyances and working towards a newly matured persona.  Question is: can a group founded on shallow commercial trends expand their premise into something more?  Or furtively speaking, can a scrawny chicken raised for market on commercial chemicals ever produce a golden egg?

Without generalizing beyond Sing It Loud, the simple answer is no.  As with most bands, what you see is what you get, and shy of purging themselves of their influences, the Minneapolis group will likely never shake its defining features.  Everything Collide still finds the band taking the easy way out, singing about nothing in particular, and hiding behind safe, sugary melodies that fade from memory well before they run their course.

The album opens with “Sugary Sweet,” a track that wouldn’t sound out of place greeting the mindless conforming masses at the entrance of a Hollister clothing store.  I make this reference for a couple of reasons.  Most obviously, the sound of sunny vocals and squeaky clean pop punk guitars certainly fits in with the modern SoCal scene, and while the band might be from much further east, it’s not hard to see why regional giants Epitaph Records snapped them up quickly.  But more importantly, just like Hollister’s fake cabana booths and palm leaf rooftops, Sing It Loud feels synthetic and derivative.  Now, this certainly isn’t the bottom of the barrel, but it’s also far from the top.

The best songs, like “Thunderstorms” or “Addicted To When You’re Gone,” succeed on the strength of their hooks, but time and again come up short with anything more than a light melody to whistle along with.  Every song subscribes to that predictably over trodden relationship rollercoaster, offering little of its own, and likely only sounding profound to adolescent girls convinced that their world is crumbling around them because their crush didn’t sit next to them during lunch.  Sure, that might sound a little harsh, but with so many more engaging and relevant pop punk acts on the rise – Spontaneo and The Wonder Yearsbeing a couple notables for the year – Everything Collide just isn’t worth giving the time of day.  Yes, Sing It Loud is miles ahead of more nauseating bands like There For Tomorrow or Artist Vs Poet, but that’s hardly anything worth throwing out a recommendation over.

So returning to my initial comment, while Everything Collide might address some issues with Sing It Loud’s initial debut, it also reinforces that the band’s superficial underpinnings are likely here to stay.