One Small Step For Landmines, If You Could Get Over Me

It’s hard to resist the temptation to compare Floridians (er, Floridian, at this point) One Small Step For Landmines and the significantly better-known Dashboard Confessional. Beyond the geographic kinship, both are shifting band/solo acts focused around punk-rock-bred guys playing hearts-on-sleeves, sweet, jangly, emo-boy acoustic pop songs, both are utter romantics who deal with love won, lost, and celebrated in myriad ways, and both have appealing, guy-next-door voices that can go from gentle melody to desperate howl at the flick of a switch.

Listen blind to most of the tracks on the free-download EP If You Could Get Over Me (get it here), and odds are that you’ll think you’re listening to the latest from Chris Carraba and company. In spite of all that, though, singer/guitarist Kevin Allen manages to distinguish himself over the course of this handful of songs, and while the Dashboard Confessional feel does stick, it doesn’t hurt things any. If the songs sound like Carraba’s, they sound like they’re among his best.

And while Carraba seems to move further towards lush orchestration and full-band stuff with each album, this album’s actually a stripped-down version of One Small Step For Landmines, with the band stepping aside to let Allen take the reins all on his own with just his voice, guitar, and these unassumingly beautiful songs. He starts with the warm, up-close “If You Could Get Over Me,” with its wonderfully sweet, nimble guitars and lyrics like a cheerier, more okay-with-the-world Elliott Smith, and dives headlong into restrained heartbreak, wishing goodbye to a love who can’t reconcile his big-stage dreams with their loathing of the band life.

“Aluminum Can Strings” is more languid and endearing, mellow but world-weary, all about dealing with the trials of a long-distance relationship, while “I Woke Up” is jangly and yearning, with Allen playing the bad guy at the end of something — when he declares, “nobody will ever treat you worse / ’cause I was first,” he doesn’t even really sound that sorry about it. He knows it’s spin, just a justification, but he also knows that that’s how a love crumbles.

The crowning moment here comes halfway through the EP, with “New York, On Purpose,” a pitch-perfect snapshot of a night spent on tour in NYC that becomes one of those nights you’ll remember for the rest of your life not because it was spectacular in some way but just because everything felt absolutely perfect. Allen’s voice here is smiling and serene, beaming as he reels back and lets the memory play, and it’s beautiful and elegaic and thoughtful, making you feel the cool city breeze across the rooftops and yearn for the blissful freedom of getting lost in a city that’s not your own.