Review Summary: Average, in every sense of the word.
These Hearts is a band who started around 2009. After releasing a demo, they were signed to Victory Records. Their first album, Forever Ended Yesterday was released in 2011. Produced by Craig Owens of Chiodos, the album received extremely negative reception, and for good reason, the album felt like a cheap Attack Attack/Chiodos rip off with awful vocals and cheesy instrumentation galore. With their sophomore effort Yours To Take, These Hearts show a lot of improvement, but don't do anything that separates them from the countless other bands in their genre of poppy sung chorus', and pseudo-heavy verses.
The album kicks off with This Is Love, featuring Bert Poncet from Chunk! No, Captain Chunk! The first thing noticeable about the song is how much the band has improved from their last release. Vocalist Isaiah Folk's singing has gone from awkwardly high pitched and forced to a lower pitch that sounds as if he's found his comfort zone as a singer. The cookie monster screams have also been improved upon. Musically the album is another improvement, featuring honest to god riffs instead of mindless chugging over and over. The chugging is still there, albeit much less noticeably than on their last album. The song itself features a very catchy chorus, and decent verses. The lyrics are okay, nothing amazing but not terrible. The next song is The Inconvenience. This song is a re-recorded version from the original on the Elephant In The Room EP released in 2012. The lyrics are incredibly corny in this song, opening up with "If you could've heard her, screaming bloody murder." The riff that accompanies the breakdown afterwords is actually pretty cool, but I can't help feeling it would've had more of an impact if the band hadn't repeated it throughout the entire song. Psycho is the song that follows and while this song is better than the last, it's still nothing special. Again the lyrics are lacking and juvenile with a chorus with lines like "Woah-Oh talk about a psycho". Miserable is by far the best song on the album. Granted it's nothing groundbreaking, the song is catchy, the instrumentation is fun, and the lyrics are surprisingly simple, yet up to par.
Here's where the album starts to go downhill though. From here on out the songs seem to blend together into a mess of something that sounds the same. Birds of a Feather is completely uneventful and sounds simply like filler. Undecided Story is one of the better songs, featuring heartfelt lyrics about someone in an abusive relationship. It's really a touching song, and is done pretty well. The next song is War, and features Mattie Montgomery from For Today. The song is a chug fest and like many of the other songs on the album, uneventful. There in lies the main problem with the album. Too many of the songs sound interchangable with each other, and sound like filler. Boring, uninspired songs. Nearly un-listenable songs. The last bright spot on the album is the pointlessly titled LOTR. The song is a straight up Pop Punk song that features the catchiest chorus on the entire album. The last song "Never Mind Me" is an acoustic ballad that should really be avoided. Cliche, boring, and uninspired.
These Hearts have definitely improved on their sophomore outing, but that's really not saying much. The album has it's highlights (Miserable, LOTR), but too many songs are just boring and uninspired affairs that add nothing to the album (War, Birds of a Feather). And then there are downright awful songs (Been Through Hell, Never Mind Me). So despite the improvement, the album is average at best.
