Showing posts with label you me at six. Show all posts
Showing posts with label you me at six. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 17, 2017

video review: 'night people' by you me at six


Man, I got absolutely nothing out of this record. I mean, it's not unlistenable but it has so little distinct personality and what it does have is obnoxious... ugh, not a fan, at all.

But hey, to switch out for entirely too much personality... well, stay tuned!

album review: 'night people' by you me at six

...so I don't really cover a lot of pop punk and pop rock. And hey, that happens - even this early in the year my schedule is filling up - but it also means that outside of the acts that crossed over and made a significant impact in the mainstream, I haven't really kept up with the scene, especially if they broke trying to capitalize on the trend in the mid-2000s and never really caught on. One thing I do know is that it tended to be a more American scene, rooted in disaffected pockets across suburbia or just from California as a whole, and while Canada has a scene that somehow has remained somewhat relevant to this day, if you cross over the U.K... well, beyond an act like Neck Deep that managed to break a few years ago, there's very few with consistent name recognition.

So I'll admit I was surprised to find about You Me At Six, a UK pop punk act from Surrey that released their debut in 2008... in other words, right into an oversaturated scene that guaranteed they'd have a hard time standing out. But having gone through their discography leading up to this review and if I'm going to be brutally honest, that might have been hard regardless. To me their two biggest influences are mid-period Jimmy Eat World and early Fall Out Boy, but less anthemic and heartfelt than the former and less unique and overwritten than the latter... in short, they didn't really stand out, not helped by records that ran long and a lack of immediately distinctive storytelling and wordplay. They got angrier on Sinners Never Sleep - which more often than not translated to a lyrical obnoxiousness that didn't have the charisma, wit, or firepower to back it up - and while shades of maturity began to slip into Cavalier Youth, it only came through on a small selection of songs that only ever rose to being good, not great, with the rest really blurring together. To me, they always seemed like a bit more like a singles act - a few good songs, but you'd never get through an entire album and find it interesting, so I have to admit a lot of trepidation going into Night People, which reportedly was heavier and was also their shortest album to date. Okay, promising, and at the very least I didn't expect this to be bad, so did You Me At Six deliver something I could like?