Review Summary: "Turn it up, we're Saves the Day"
9 is the 9th album by Saves the Day, and if you didn’t know that upon listening then don’t worry. Because across this album’s 9 songs (subtle), Chris Conley will drill into your head the following: this is a Saves the Day album (and according to him you’re gonna love it!), Saves the Day has been a band for a while now, Saves the Day’s first album came out in 1997, and Saves the Day has guitars in them. The whole album is lyrically fueled by Chris’s nostalgia for the early days of Saves the Day, except his idea of nostalgia is simply just saying his band name, the year they started, and their genre over and over again. The album literally opens with the line “oh yeah we’re writing a record / you know you’re gonna love it”, before transitioning into the chorus clumsily with one of the worst self references in music history. The second song is literally just a love song to the guitar he wrote their debut album on, but written with the depth of 5th grade poetry. What’s even more mind-blowing is the aforementioned opening two songs are easily the best material on the album, as next we get “Side by Side”. A STRONG competitor for the worst song they’ve ever written, “Side by Side” is a mind numbingly repetitive classic rock aping slow burner with Chris’s worst vocals to date, with the same ***ty nostalgia bating lyrics as the rest of the album.
The rest of the album doesn’t fare much better either. Remember how good Chris used to be at writing a hook on songs like “Freakish”, “Can't Stay the Same”, or hell even any song off the self-titled album? Well throw all that out the window, because here we have “Rendezvous”, where the chorus melody is literally one note repeated over and over again over a ***ty Weezer knockoff instrumental. Remember the Sound the Alarm/Under the Boars/Daybreak trilogy where even though not technically proficient, the backing band at least tried pushing their boundaries to back up Chris’s writing? Well here we get “Kerouac and Cassidy”, which revolves around a QOTSA knockoff pitch shifted riff that a 14 year old would be ashamed of if he came up with it. There’s barely anything worth talking about any of the other songs because they’re all too short to go anywhere, have nothing to latch onto melodically and all have the same cliché self-referential lyrics until the 21 minute closer “29” which somehow feels even more half written than the rest of the record.
“29” instrumentally attempts to switch moods a la Daybreak’s title track, except none of it works because the different sections have no cohesiveness whatsoever while also completely blending into each other because they’re so ***ing banal. The instrumental and lyrics are as uninspired as the rest of the album, and eventually it shifts into more of the same *** in a different key and the big climax of the whole album is…Chris looking into his dad’s eyes? But none of the payoff feels remotely warranted because the whole song-no, whole album is a meandering, uninspired, stream of nothing. This album is an uninspired mess narrated by a 2nd rate Buzzfeed article, except even worse. Because where a Buzzfeed album is entirely to get cheap nostalgia out of the lowest common denominator, at least they get that quick rush of fond memories of a time they experienced. The only person this is aimed towards is Conley himself, which means the album can’t even work on a conceptual level. The only rush of nostalgia the listener can get from this, is remembering when they actually ***ing put effort in their music. Turn it off.
