Review Summary: Breathe Carolina resign themselves to boring, predictable pop music.
Breathe Carolina are known for being a band with one particular gimmick - they're a pop group that literally embodies the good cop/bad cop vocal dynamic, with David Schmitt playing the role of the pretty boy clean vocalist and Kyle Evans as the rough rider screamer. Despite this sounding like a recipe for disaster, the band made it work throughout most of their discography: "Hello Fascination" was a Europop wonderland where influences could change on a dime and the songs drove the production and not vice versa, and "Hell Is What You Make It" was a Top 40 paradise that downplayed the band's hardcore elements and focused on memorable slices of pop goodness. HIWYMI produced the band's first charting single, "Blackout", and from then on the band's slide toward an even more radio friendly sound was an inevitability. The only question is how well it would be handled. Last year, Kyle Evans left the group, and the future of Breathe Carolina was called into question - how could a duo that's made so much of their duel vocals dynamic possibly continue when half of it is gone? The answer is: very mediocre-ly.
Most of the songs on the album take the form of regular EDM-influenced pop music that you'd hear on virtually any other pop album nowadays. This isn't always a bad thing: "Bang it Out" is a raunchy romp that will stick in your head and features a lot of the group's signature sounds, and "Collide" would not only feel right at home on any club floor, but might even stick out from the legions of uninspired dreck that passes for dance music when you're drunk enough. The problem is that they are both essentially the same song, and they don't have any hooks to speak of - it's much closer to the unassuming dance music I just described than any sort of memorable pop song. The one song that features their previous hardcore influences is "Sellouts", which sees the unique-if-flawed vocals of Kyle replaced with the talentless barks of Asking Alexandria vocalist Danny Worsnop. Despite sounding painfully awkward at times and not reaching anywhere near the songwriting heights of their earlier material, it's still a fun song that is legitimately catchy.
Overall, "Savages" is a passable piece of modern pop music, and it's certainly decent on the ears while it's playing. It's been carefully crafted by modern producers and songwriters that work on very successful Top 40 bands, meaning that the mixes and electronics sound absolutely marvelous. Unfortunately, instead of using this to support the songs, the songs end up using this production as the sole thing that makes them even slightly interesting, and "Savages" loses what luster it has after just one spin. I'm willing to write this one off as a casualty of Breathe Carolina's troubled year - these guys are just too talented to be producing boring, samey pop music.
