Yellowcard – Southern Air

Yellowcard‘s 2011 When You’re Through Thinking, Say Yes was a double serving of acoustic and pop punk that put the band in a position it hadn’t seen since Ocean Avenue. Suffice to say they’re in no need of a mainstream revival. Their latest, Southern Air, is a better album in almost every way, as good as the band has ever been, and a new take on a signature style meant for the band’s new, bigger audience.

Opening with the dark, thoughtful “Awakening” this album’s tracks contain broader range than any of Yellowcard’s earlier work. In its most primordial Where We Stand-era state each tune off a Yellowcard album broke down neatly into, essentially, “about a girl, sad” and “about a girl, happy.” The depth and breadth of the group’s subject matter has grown steadily fromthere. “Awakening” is an achievement in subtle self-criticism Yellowcard had not made before, and “The Surface of the Sun” is just as good, and catchier.

Somehow Yellowcard still manages to tell stories about discovering the beach and “the best summer ever.” As this album represents a merging of their original stylistic ambitions with the expectations of modern pop-punk, its reliance on the themes and imagery prominent among its earliest albums reintroduce the band to a potential new audience. While the opening track portends a darker, heavier album – and in many ways it is – as much of it is spent on the summer as on the melodic and foreboding bass work.

Critiques of the band’s style under the leadership of Ryan Key have focused on how damn hard it is to write a pop song that is both heavy on the strings and worth its own emotional weight. Most of this album’s richly textured song-craft is immune to this accusation, but not all. “Rivertown Blues,” laying on thick the lines about closing ones’ eyes and falling, smells of self-indulgence. “Ten” opens with a genuinely haunting tune, but its deathly serious tale wears itself out by the third refrain.

Yellowcard has an impressive stage presence and those more dramatic tracks will play pitch-perfect in a live setting but lack the same emotional resonance in digital. From its inception Yellowcard could never be accused of under-producing an album, and their relationship with their label pays off on this crispest of works. No track outstays its welcome by so much as a second – which is good, when some are another beat of pop-orchestral away from overwrought.

The eponymous closing track makes the end of the album feel abrupt, and one does not surface from it gently. As with tourmates Saves The Day, the band’s style is enjoying a comeback and a reintroduction to the mainstream. If Yellowcard keeps producing work like this it will pay off in the surge so many lost bands of the early millennium tried and died for.