It’s mad that it took Broadway Calls seven years to release the follow up to their brilliant 2013 album Comfort/Distraction. In July this year the three-piece from Oregon finally released a brand new album titled Sad In The City. Released by Red Scare Industries, label boss Toby Jeg has said it’s the best thing they’ve ever put out. That is a big statement when you look back at how many amazing releases Red Scare have put out over the years. Enough waffle, let’s crack on with Sad In The City.
Sad In The City begins with Never Take Us Alive. This was the perfect song to start the album and a great way to reintroduce the band to their fans along with showing exactly what to expect for any new listeners of Broadway Calls. The track begins quite slowly and softly before building up to the main portion of the song. As soon as the chorus hits, the band have you singing along passionately and looking forward to where the album goes. Up next we have You Gotta Know which also starts softly before vocalist Ty Vaughn’s distinctive vocals come in and inject the track will a lot of energy. I’ve always thought that Ty’s vocals are cleaner and poppier than many of the bands contemporaries in their pop punk scene and that’s helped the band stand out massively. The song is about wanting to tell someone special how you feel about them. The third track is the album’s title track, Sad In The City. This song looks at how communities are being torn apart by wars started by rich people. Lyrically the song is superb, there are some great sing-alongs alongside some hard hitting imagery. “There’s a stain on the road shaped like a kid” is just one instance of this.
Always On The Run is about life on tour and the different life experiences that happen along the way. With its simple and catchy chorus, it’s guaranteed to find a home in your head. The song also feels full of joy as Ty recounts moments from tour that he seems to have happy memories of. About halfway through the track there’s a nice call and respond moment that leads to the bridge and builds to one final chorus. It’s great stuff. The fifth song is titled There’s A Glow. Broadway Calls play around with their sound slightly on the track with the verses venturing into garage rock territory. Of course, when the chorus hits we get that big Broadway Calls anthemic style that we all know and love. It’s nice to hear a band playing around with their style but also not forgetting what people love about them in the first place. Take Me Down has quite a startling start. It opens with a brief moment of acoustic guitar before we get a fantastically brash chorus to really get us started. At the halfway point of Sad In The City this was great track ordering as it gives the album another shot of energy. The chorus is another huge ear worm that will encourage huge amounts of audience participation in the future. Radiophobia was one of the singles released to promote Sad In The City and shows a darker and heavier side of the band. For the first time on the release Ty plays around with his peddle board to create some fantastic effects that really set the tone for the entire song. The track is a personal one to Ty as it is about growing up near a radiation cooling tower and knowing from the age of seven what it would mean to his friends and family in the town if the nuclear reactor were to have a meltdown. Just reading about it is terrifying so to have experienced it firsthand must have been horrible.
Slick New Truth sees Broadway Calls revert back to the tried and trusted and is one of my favourites on Sad In The City. This is infectious pop punk at its finest. The track reminds me of Be All That You Can Be from Good Views Bad News as it feels like Broadway Calls are really trying to spread their political message. In the case of Slick New Shoes, it’s about how the news has been streamlined down and you’re not always given the whole story. This is a bad thing. This song feels more relevant than ever given how we consume our news stories these days. The ninth song, Meet Me On The Moon, is a song about getting away from all the troubles on earth with that special someone. The song is a lot of fun but also shows a serious side when you think about how bad the world must currently be if you want to escape all the way to the moon. I can see this song being a big favourite with Broadway Calls fans. The penultimate song is Big Mouth. This is more of a mid-tempo track that makes me think of a cross between Social Distortion and The Ergs, that will enable massive barroom singalongs when such things are able to happen again. The line “I’ve got a big mouth and it gets me into trouble” is perhaps the most contagious on the entire album which is really saying something. I can really see this song being a set closer for the band and what a joyous occasion it will be. Sad In The City is completed by Went Dyin’. This is such a change of direction after Big Mouth. It’s a sadder song with much heavier tones than anything else on the album. The song looks at self-destructive tendencies in people and why they occur. Of course the song has a massive chorus and will be extremely cathartic for anyone listening. A sadder song seems completely appropriate for finishing Sad In The City.
Sad In The City has received nothing but positive reviews and rightly so. From beginning to end it’s packed with fantastic pop punk. I’m not sure why it was such a long gap between albums but it’s certainly been worth the wait. For me this is easily the band’s best work so far. It’s the biggest shame that the band’s UK tour with The Flatliners was cancelled earlier this year, I was looking forward to seeing them at both Manchester Punk Festival and the New Cross Inn and I’m anxiously awaiting future dates. In the meantime I’ll be listening to Sad In The City a lot.
Stream and download Sad In The City on Bandcamp here.
Like Broadway Calls on Facebook here.
This review was written by Colin Clark.
No comments:
Post a Comment