Review Summary: War Paint is essentially Reach For The Sun reborn and fine-tuned: enter the definitive album for the summer of 2011.
To more or less get why The Dangerous Summer are so good, you best just listen to their full-lengths and not take the word of those that would sell them short, like the actual band members themselves. In a 2010 interview with
DrivenFarOff, frontman and lead songwriter AJ Perdomo merely described the difference between the band's first two EPs and the band's 2009 debut,
Reach For The Sun, as just this and no more:“The EP[s] [are] kind of less mature. I think
Reach For The Sun is more developed.” In truth the singer was inadvertently masking the band's own goldmine of an album with a hopeful yet seemingly unaware statement of what was his perceived progression for the band. But as a seasoned fan of the debut knows – especially in the two years since its release –
Reach For The Sun is much more than
just a developed step for a struggling, at-that-time perceivable generic pop-punk band: it's a bare, honest musical statement, full of subtle hooks and free of that suffocating, pseudo-sunny bull sh
it that has permeated the recent works of many of The Dangerous Summer's contemporaries:
Valencia,
Fireworks, though on a smaller scale, and
Taking Back Sunday, to name a few.
On
Reach For The Sun, frontman Perdomo was painted as a semi-grand and fallible human being: he leveled with you with every word he penned on the page, and surprisingly, he never rose above that set level of humanity, if only sinking lower for further emotional gravity in context of the songs. “I'm learning now that I was wrong in everything / And that's the reason why I think that I can grow,” was a line that resonated with many on
Reach For The Sun's lead single, “Where I Want To Be”: These guys were actually saying something worth noticing for the young adult demographic, and more importantly, The Dangerous Summer were believable in what they were saying too. As time has had its way with
Reach For The Sun since its 2009 release, and in turn, the record having had its way with listeners, The Dangerous Summer have only gained all the more momentum with their effect on record, quickly blazing a hole through summer '09 and '10 all too easily.
But summer '11 bares tidings of a newcomer, mind you. If
Reach For The Sun is the kind of album that lives a quiet pedestrian but resilient life of the unnoticed working man, follow-up
War Paint is its bigger, more mature brother finally returned home from a few years at war across seas: a little shaken and weary, but all the more stronger for the trials The Dangerous Summer and frontman Perdomo have been through in the past three years during the process of, as the band says itself, “growing up”. Whereas
Reach For The Sun was more subtle in its approach,
War Paint, while making an entrance with its hooks and lyrical weight in much the same way as the former, is more direct and fine-tuned: The Dangerous Summer still have a target they are shooting for with their songs – that is, you - but this time they are more confident and experienced in their delivery, nailing their target[s] over and f
ucking over again.
Fallen man's anthem “Work In Progress” is a wrecking ball of determination that is firmly founded on the rolling drums of Tyler Minsberg and the guitars of Cody Payne and Bryan Czap instrumentally, bettering
Yellowcard's own similar-topic “The Sound of You and Me” of this year in the process as well. The double-chorus slam of the song carries singer Perdomo to the front of the audience excitedly with his gruff declarations: “Even death can bring a man to life when he sits right up and says nothing tastes the same,” the singer declares in the second lead-in to the song's chorus section. Perdomo's ability to ride the wave of powerful one-liners never ceased to amaze on
Reach For The Sun, but on
War Paint he's officially the king of this year's Facebook statuses everywhere.“I don't mind waking up alone / As long as you're okay, it's all okay,” he sings in the
William Fitzsimmons-like persona of mid-album highlight “Siren”, letting his subject of interest know, as well as listeners, that his humbleness is still wonderfully intact despite his band's success.
War Paint becomes firm yet anthemic when its tempo lulls with lighters-in-the-air “Good Things” and “Everyone Left” with a
The Graduate-like reserved fashion and snappy and determined when its tempo is reversely increased in rockers “No One's Gonna Need You More” and “Miscommunication”. The latter is a classic send-off to a failing relationship that places listeners in the mind of Perdomo's disappointed girlfriend for a fresh perspective: “I'm tired of being second best / Get out / And find that pseudo-comfort somewhere else,” she commands, and you can all but see the very presuppositions of the foundations of their relationship churning backwards in Perdomo's own head in that instant, he undeniably questioning himself. His uncertainty is appealing and genuinely
realistic, which is one of the reasons why he's so easy to identify with as a singer. “I find out who I really am / It takes some time for me, but that's okay,” he confesses on “I Should Leave Right Now”, and on next cut “Parachute” over the band's backing instrumental hooks that never let up he declares that “it took some time, but at least I'm clear out of hell.” Just about any other frontman, with any other agenda, wouldn't be able to pull these songs off like Perdomo and the resilent pop-rock of his band can, and that's why
War Paint, and its predecessor, work so damn good in practice.
AbsolutePunk's reviewer Blake Solomon said in his review two years ago that
Reach For The Sun's success and power lies in its universality, but in hindsight the music of that album and its follow-up,
War Paint, are not exactly universal, in a sense. Indeed, many of the bands in The Dangerous Summer's scene are not making the music that this band is: quite frankly, while hopeful and optimistic, that music isn't as honest or
real in its approach. No, the likes of
War Paint is easy to tell apart from an album like last year's
Dancing With A Ghost and is more primed for a set demographic, tired of the pretense, the selfishness, and, in many cases, the naivety of certain blends of pop-punk and its many spin-off sub-genres. Perdomo and his band are real guys here, with some real monster-size hooks, living through the lulls of yours and my life and singing honestly about them, breaking through their own, ours, and the genre's walls in the process; they play music to a place in us that rarely gets much attention, just because most other similar bands can't reach it like they can. It's like Perdomo says in end-tail highlight “In My Room”, “I have a mindset to deconstruct you”: you see, The Dangerous Summer is all about getting to your core in order to tug at your emotions in a honest way on
War Paint. Thankfully, they wonderfully succeed in doing just that in 2011, and in more ways, and to more audiences, than just one as well.
