Review Summary: I leave you now, but you have so much more to do - and every story I have told is part of you.
I miss Yellowcard, man. It’s been almost four years since they dropped their self-titled finale, but I feel their absence now more than ever. Months-deep into a quarantine over COVID-19, I’m inching closer and closer to summertime, but things just don’t feel the same anymore. It’s like somehow the spirit of summer got sucked out of the sun; the rays hit my skin but I don’t feel the warmth. Normally this is the season that I’d be gearing up for road trips, beaches, hikes, amusement parks, and vacations. There’s a sense of disillusionment in the air, as if 2020 isn’t even happening. I’m just waiting it out, burrowed in my bunker and waiting for the “all clear” that is beginning to seem like a pipe dream. This is when I’d lean on Yellowcard’s optimism, and heck, now would have even been the right time-interval for a new album. The idea of Yellowcard releasing records when I need them to most, especially right around summer, is practically a staple of my musical identity. So as I’m holed up at home, without summer as I remember it
or Yellowcard to pull me through, my life feels a little bit darker.
Perhaps that’s why I’m relating to
Lights & Sounds so much lately. The record was billed as being more serious than its cheerful predecessor,
Ocean Avenue – something of a concept album about the band’s disenchantment with fame and Hollywood; the “lights and sounds” of life in the spotlight if you will. The overall tone and atmosphere is much darker, from the title track blasting their label/the music industry to ‘City of Devils’ – which deals with isolation and is by far the saddest thing they’ve penned. Needless to say,
Lights & Sounds hits home now more than it did in 2006 when I was a high school senior living it up. What was once an alienating experience suddenly has more relevance to me than ever before.
Despite the rose-tinted glasses through which I view albums like
Ocean Avenue,
Paper Walls,
When You’re Through Thinking, Say Yes, and
Southern Air, there’s plenty to be taken from an offering like
Lights & Sounds. It’s arguably the only album in Yellowcard’s discography that isn’t afraid to delve into murkier shades and tonalities. Most of the tracks here espouse forlorn choruses with overwhelmingly negative lyrical motifs, like “there's nothing to fight for, it's already dead” or “grey skies clouding up the things we used to see with wide eyes”. These aren’t your picture-perfect depictions of summer love, but then again,
Lights & Sounds was never meant to be that kind of an album. Ryan Key writes of post-breakup depression (“I heard a voice last night, it said ‘wake up, and open your eyes’…She don't care if you're dead or alive”), the fallout from the Iraq war (“Jimmy's mother went to Capitol Hill so she could fill her heart up with joy / Maybe shake a few hands while she's there, and tell him thank you, sir, for taking my boy”), drug abuse (“…So give me one more line, and from the sky, she pulled me down tonight”), and a fear of death (“Somewhere she heard there was some place to go, when you die when you live like we do”). This is more than just a reflection of fame’s blinding lights and the negative emotions that come with it – it’s about the band and what they were going through in their personal lives at the time. It’s probably a more sincere offering than what we got the twentieth time they used the word “summer” in one of their future lyrics.
When I found myself let down by this release in the past, it was truthfully never about the quality of the music on display.
Lights & Sounds possesses some of Yellowcard’s most complex and nuanced songwriting, whether it’s the pianos and vocal duet on ‘How I Go’, the trumpet in ‘Two Weeks From Twenty’, or the extended orchestral outro on ‘Holly Wood Died’. I always recognized the improved craftsmanship and gear-shifting from pop-punk to pop-rock as signs of maturity, but the problem was simply that I wanted Yellowcard to serve the function that
I wanted them to serve – basically, to be my soundtrack to all things warm and fuzzy. I’m aware of my own hypocrisy, as even fourteen years later I’m sitting here – in this very review, no less – lamenting the lack of good ‘ol pop-punk sunshine to “get me through these dark times.” I guess there’s a part of me that always wants to relive the past. I’m reminded of
Southern Air’s ‘Always Summer’, where Ryan Key sings, “it’s always summer in my heart and in my soul”, but now it makes me wonder if he meant it ironically.
Lights & Sounds was lukewarmly received by critics and was generally a commercial flop, which forced Yellowcard back into their roles as perpetual summer optimists. What if that’s not who they wanted to be? As a fan, was I no better than the labels who told them to, as Key puts it on ‘Lights and Sounds’, “make it new, but stay in the lines”? And to, “smile big for everyone”? Maybe that’s why Yellowcard abandoned this approach in favor of another punchy, upbeat pop-punk album the very next year with
Paper Walls and never looked back.
As the black sheep in Yellowcard’s discography,
Lights & Sounds will probably always be overlooked. It simply isn’t the sort of mood that people flock to Yellowcard to embrace, in part because there are many artists that pull off “depressing” better than this band of sprightly pop-punkers. Still, one has to wonder if this isn’t the realest thing they ever wrote. Keeping that in mind, it’s also nice to have something to accompany darker days, because no matter how much Ryan Key sang about it being “always summer” on future endeavors, that simply isn’t real life. The world throws you curveballs and kicks you while you’re down. That’s when it helps to shout the lyrics to ‘City of Devils’ at the top of your lungs. We may be without Yellowcard’s sparkling, uplifting brand of energy these days, but luckily they left us this lump of coal precisely for times like this.
