CD Reviews

Saves the Day | Daybreak

Razor + Tie (2011)

By LIZ PELLY | September 7, 2011

1.0 Stars

After 14 years and six studio albums, Jersey pop-punk quartet Saves the Day return with a seventh serving of nasal-y hyper-introspective power-emo. Daybreak — a record about "acceptance" — is the closing piece to a "trilogy" of albums, the first of which dropped five years ago. At times that conceit seems pretentious for what are essentially 11 tracks of generic Hot Topic rock. Case in point is the 10-minute opening title track that includes five "movements." This can mostly be overlooked, though, given the record's amazing song titles, like "Fucked Up Past the Point of Fixing" and "Living without Love," plus lyrics like "Inside I'm broke, I'm cracked, I'm alone/No hope for a change, no way to erase/The world would be better without me." Brilliant! There isn't much new here, but at this point no one really wants something new from early-aughts emo bands — this shit will always appeal to tweens, and nowadays grown-up emo kids mostly appreciate bands like Saves the Day for nostalgic value anyway. And though Daybreak generally fulfils that longing for the simpler days of 2001's Stay What You Are, it's ultimately hard to understand why it's taken almost three years to make such a simplistic record.

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