The Dangerous Summer - Reach for the sun

Can a band getting their name from an Hemingway novel really be bad? It's at least not the case for The Dangerous Summer. The Maryland's quatuor had offered us one of 2007's most promising EP's with 'If you could only keep me alive' and release today their first album.

Produced by Paul Levitt who, between a lot of others, has worked with Dashboard Confessional and All Time Low, 'Reach for the sun' is closer to the moving simplicity of the first than to the pop-punk hits of the second. The album is catchy but not over-made, over-produced or too sugary. Transitions between songs are fluent and choruses don't brutally cut with the rest of the compositions, not limiting the songs' interest to a few seconds of melody. The tracks are quality songs and have been taken care over as a whole, not only living through their chorus. The Dangerous Summer navigate between pop-punk energy ('Surfaced'), pop-rock compositions ('Weathered') and alternative rock melodies ('Where you want to be'), in the style of their influence Third Eye Blind. Harmonies are soft but poignant, as for example the wonderful 'This is war' which will appear among the best songs of the year. Guitar parts often sound alike but don't make the record redundant, on the contrary they give it a strong homogeneity and regularity. We find a certain "atmospheric" aspect in the riffs and better dynamics in the drums' rhythm. Where the EP failed, the album succeeds.
The domain where the band excels is however the vocals and lyrics' one. The vocal performance of A.J. Perdomo is full of sincerity and emotion, without necessarily going near the annoying moan. He has a distinctive way to start some sentences that works every time and he manages to convey a positive energy, relayed by his lyrics' optimism recounting many hard times of his life: "I really think for once that I can change / It’s really not that bad / I’m learning now that I was wrong in everything / And that’s the reason why I think that I can grow". The song 'Permanent rain', already featured on the EP, differed much from the other tracks and has more its place here. We can almost touch the sincerity of the young songwriter (he is only 20) when he is singing "I wish it was me in the car that day", the song dealing with the loss of one of his friends. The singer entirely bases his songwriting on his experience and his past, which gives him a huge emotional strenght. The lyrics aren't necessarily deep or exceptional, but their sincerity and the sweet nostalgia radiated by some songs ('Reach for the sun') will touch every listener. Simple but passionate. The record suddenly ends with a cry from the heart of Perdomo: "But it's worth it / To never feel alone", in the style of Emile Hirsch's character in the movie 'Into the wild'.

The Dangerous Summer offer us a solid and quality album. It is not rambling with a hit here and there, but smooth and consistant. The songs sound alike at first sight and the record thus needs several listenings to grow in you, but they are worth it once you will prick up your ears to them.
Real and fresh, brimming with honesty, 'Reach for the sun' is not "fun", it is good and beautiful. Ideal for summer, yet you won't play it around a barbecue with your impeccable suntan friends, but rather in your car facing the sunset, just like its wonderful cover. Within a genre suffocated by bands only thinking about partying, an album easy to listen to while being smart won't harm the FM waves.

4/5

Recommanded if you like:
The Starting Line, Valencia, Over It
Check also:
Dropout Year, Driving East, Parade The Day

www.myspace.com/dangeroussummer
(Hopeless Records, 2009)