You Me at Six, Sinners Never Sleep

I’ve been sitting on this album for a while, because I was hoping that if I went back to it I might like it a bit better. The first song, “Loverboy,” is catchy in both the lyrics and the music — it’s got a great toe-tapping beat that makes me wish the whole album was like this. It has that power-rock quality where it doesn’t need screaming to be heavy. It reminds me of the band Noise Ratchet or someone along those lines, only it has some “da-da-da”s in it, which was originally from some sort of rock-type band.

After that, we reach the end of the third song, “Bite My Tongue,” in which we hear some F-bombs screamed in a way that this band doesn’t need to emphasize their angst and heartbreak. Lines like, “I’ll slow this down because I know you can’t keep up,” make me really want to like this album because it’s just filled with such cockiness and the kind of feeling like you know someone is flipping you off behind your back but you don’t turn around, so the real FU is on them.

You Me at Six does well at making this pop-punk sound (like Cartel, Yellowcard, etc.) sound heavier than what it really is (think The Beautiful Mistake), and that is kind of fun for me, but when they add in all this growling and screaming (which may just be the guest spots), it just seems so unnecessary. If they could just stick to this pure sort of power-rock, then they’d be fine in my book, but since they seem to want to go into some kind of “–core” at different points throughout various songs, all I can do is look the other way.