Review Summary: I'll take my chances to live again.
Energy is a tricky thing to maintain across the stretch of a full record because, as I once wrote, nobody's shocked by an explosion in a burning building; it can get tiresome, too, screaming your heart out sans respite: vocal cords and guitar chords alike have been known to hit that wall. There's also an unspoken pressure on even the youngest and most naive of bands to
experiment, which leads to a host of sappy piano ballads half-way through set lists, songs that are ironically not even slightly innovative. For whatever reason, it's become common practice for even the most impassioned of pop-punk artists to slide a couple of acoustic tracks into a track list. It helps to maintain focus.
Not The Dangerous Summer, though. Hell no -
War Paint jumps in with both feet at the deep end and remains submerged for the best part of 45 minutes. Strangely, here is where the caveat should go, where I should tell you that Maryland's The Dangerous Summer sidestep the usual barrier of relentless adrenaline by, I don't know, being more up-tempo than most, or having a full-time glockenspiel player, or something crazy like that. They don't. They don't need to.
War Paint is crisp, spirited pop-rock a la Mayday Parade, hooks and all, and its method for remaining enthralling is the simple act of being
really fucking good.
Because The Dangerous Summer can carve diversity and variety in gaps that other bands see as an individual possibility; the tempo shifts here are subtle, the changes in lyrical and musical tone implicit rather than openly stated. None of what the band attempt and perfectly execute is world-altering, but there's also something much more impressive here than the oft-lauded
excellent pop songs. There are undoubtedly 11 of those on
War Paint, momentous and dramatic choruses, wriggling guitar lines, youthful outpouring, but there's also a second edge to the sword.
War Paint is, for example, a veritable wall of sound; its guitars leave very, very little room to breathe. And AJ Perdomo's vocal and lyrical stylings carry more than a hint of Jason Lancaster's in the way they seem to control the ebb and flow of all that surrounds them.
Basically devoid of clichés, Perdomo's songs are the expansive explorations of mindsets, insights into the workings of an emotional brain, constructed as a ceaseless barrage of images and feelings. You could even make the argument that across the running time of
War Paint the listener doesn't get enough space from The Dangerous Summer's vocalist, and certainly, this whole thing is a suffocating experience, but the confines of the cymbal crashes do leave you one place to run: the hooks.
War Paint occupies a less-travelled corner of the catchy domain, half-way between deliberately anthemic and accidentally intoxicating, to the extent that 'No One's Gonna Need You More' becomes at the same time totally unforgettable and weirdly elusive. It's in this delicate balance you can detect the sparks of a really, really special band.
But for all the cited volume and sincerity, what's best of all is that the record's quietest (least loud) song summarises everything impressive about
War Paint in one fell swoop; 'In My Room' toes the line between tender and troubled throughout, but there's a point about 4 bars in where it seems to stop pretending it is capable or desirous of continuing without a superb rhythm, which it duly finds. By track 10 of 11, one might expect the roof of The Dangerous Summer's burning building to have collapsed, but the explosions are still firing from all angles, and it's exhilarating to watch the sparks fly.
