Review: Yellowcard-Paper Walls

10Jul07

Yellowcard is back with their newest album, Paper Walls, which will hit stores on July 17th.  After their last outing, Lights and Sounds, I thought it would be hard for them to top the musical quality of that album…but I was wrong.

Paper Walls is absolutely amazing.  Definitely, without a doubt, the best album they have ever put out.  The band is louder, more mature, and seems to be having a lot more fun with this one.  The album opens up with an awesome song, The Takedown, which is quite a loud ballad.  It then cuts into one of the songs from the Myspace preview, Fighting.  This song wasn’t exactly my favorite from the preview, but, it does seem to be a perfect fit to come right after The Takedown.

The album continues into different songs like Shrink the World, which, in my opinion, has the best lyrics on the album.  Naturally, it’s about shrinking the world, as it has become somewhat complex.  The album already sounds to me to be more of a sequel to Ocean Avenue, their album from 2003.  Where I believed that Lights and Sounds was more of an “experimental” album to try new things, I feel like Paper Walls takes us right back to the Yellowcard that was more popular (while I loved Lights and Sounds, many people didn’t).

My favorite track on this album is a song called Five Becomes Four.  I had mentioned that it was an amazing song when I first gave my impressions of the preview.  This song is the most rockin’ tune they’ve released, in my opinion (a title previously held by Lights and Sounds on the last album).  The song will hopefully be the second single on the album (the current single is Light Up the Sky, another one of my favorites here).  They conveniently placed Five Becomes Four right in the middle of the album, as kind of a “climatic” moment, where you think things will start getting slower, then picking back up for a kickass finale.  Forget the slower part…this album is just kickass.

I do have to say that I’m very impressed with the way this album turned out.  This has been a pretty slow year for the musical world (in my opinion, anyway…others will definitely fight me on that one), and Yellowcard came along and saved the world again.  The underdogs are back.  And in full force.  I give Paper Walls a 9.8/10.

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