Review Summary: You will never be alone.
My nineteenth birthday was a busy one – it was my first college summer semester off, I had to have my wisdom teeth pulled out, and
Paper Walls was released. Mind you, this was 2007 – and people still occasionally bought CDs – so first thing in the morning, before my dreaded dentist appointment, I raced over to the electronics section of a local Best Buy (remember when like, one quarter of their store was music？simpler times…) and got my hands on Yellowcard’s sixth LP. I’ll never forget jumping in my car, sliding that bad boy in, and blaring ‘The Takedown’ as I flew up the highway, probably going at least 80 miles per hour, and allowing the warm morning air to blast through the windows while the most important music to me at that time funneled through my speakers. It was mid-July and there was new Yellowcard to be heard. LPIII’s insane drumming, Mendez’s catchy-as-all-hell riffs, and Ryan frantically singing above it all; how could things get any better？
For as much as
Ocean Avenue defined my years in high school, guiding me through the bumbling, awkward phases of attempting to court a girl in my AP Calc class,
Paper Walls was my college chapter. It was the last album that Yellowcard would drop before going on an extended – and at the time, indefinite – hiatus, so it saw me through all four years of university. After
Lights and Sounds’ darker themes both delighted and alienated fans,
Paper Walls was a welcome return to the sunny, warm, coastal California vibes that most people associated Yellowcard with. For a teen who was spending the first four years of his life away from family and friends – struggling with relationships, making friends, and forging a new concept of home – it was everything at that time. I needed the familiarity.
Of course in retrospect, Yellowcard has done better than this album, but from 2007-2010 it was basically my
Ocean Avenue 2.0 – a title that it would not relinquish until the vastly superior
Southern Air hit shelves in 2012. The biggest knock against
Paper Walls is the subdued violin presence, which only noticeably peaks its head through on a couple of tracks. I don’t even recall caring about that at the time though, because in 2007 music hit me in a totally different way. I was less critical. Everything sounded life changingly relevant. It’s a sensation I desperately miss, this feeling of living through music in a way that my jaded, critical ears can’t seem to do anymore. That’s part of what I associate with
Paper Walls: this blissful naivety where music
spoke to me, accompanied me through life, and ultimately shaped memories that will last a lifetime.
Paper Walls is a hopeless romantic. “If I could then I’d shrink the world tonight”, Key belts out on the album’s third track, before tying it together with, “so that I would find, you and me inside.” Sure it’s a bit corny, but it’s Yellowcard, so you can’t think for one second that Ryan Key’s heart isn’t fully invested in every verse. Lines like “You know I need something that's real” or “But you've come this far with a broken heart” sound better than they read, which is a testament to Key’s delivery and the band’s ability to elevate the emotion of the music that backs his voice during such moments. Yellowcard has always been a simple band – be it vocally, instrumentally, lyrically – but the passion they record and perform live with has always elevated them above their peers, while simultaneously linking them to their fans in a way far more meaningful than any slightly more complex guitar solo could. So when Ryan sings “hear me now, you will never be alone” on the impassioned title track and
Paper Walls curtain-call, you believe it. In fact, you take it as a promise.
As the ocean vibes swell throughout,
Paper Walls delivers a handful of Yellowcard’s best but most forgotten songs. Nobody ever talks about ‘Cut Me, Mick” for example, a song that feels so genuinely invested and inspiring that it’s a wonder it didn’t become more popular. Key pleads, seemingly in hopeful desperation, “You are the one that I need, you know that I can still bleed…bring me back to life”, before singing, knowingly, “…and the more you say you don't care, the more I know you're there.” This is the kind of song
Paper Walls lives off of – these incredibly well executed, sometimes questionably produced, but still overwhelmingly
affecting tracks. ‘Five Becomes Four’ is another one; a reference to former guitarist Ben Harper leaving the band that could be extrapolated to mean even more personal – “When you're all alone with the melody / Do you close your eyes and think of me？” It’s also one of the aforementioned
few tracks where the violin really shines. The title track is hands down the best thing here though, commencing with a children’s choir that actually doesn’t sound all that contrived (they’re all a little bit contrived, let’s face it), before erupting into these huge-sounding riffs that are accompanied by the most reassuring lyrical passage in Yellowcard’s entire discography: “Here I am, still holding on to this dream we had / Won't let go of it / Hear me now, you will never be alone.” Key sings so emphatically here, and with such conviction, that even though he’s most likely singing about the girl from
Ocean Avenue, it bridges the gap between lyrical storyline and reality – becoming an anthem of sorts for fans who follow Yellowcard’s albums like chapters in a book. Had their hiatus turned into a permanent one, it would have served as a perfect, if slightly ironic, swan song.
Paper Walls is one of Yellowcard’s best but least mentioned moments. There are no mega-hits to anchor this in pop-punk lore, but that’s part of the album’s charm. It feels much more personal and purposeful. In a discography overflowing with mainstream success, they almost needed an album like this. It paved the way for
When You’re Through Thinking, Say Yes because it showed the band how to craft summery pop-punk jams without trying to make each track into a single – and by 2011, they sorted out some of the weird issues with overproduction that surface here. All in all, it’s a great bridge between the group’s adolescent success and their more mature, post-hiatus offerings. As the members of Yellowcard were facing that transformation, many of their fans were just like me – in their late teens, transitioning into adulthood. I can’t speak for everyone, but it was pretty damn nice to have an album like
Paper Walls to see me through it.
