Ah, to be young and in love and then broken-hearted and all that other jazz that happens when you still live with your parents and don't have a care in the world. That's the feeling you get when listening to this album. In other words, it's yet another pop punk album that, regardless of the harmonies working, the guitars kicking in at just the precise moments and the chorus sticking in your head like a catapulted porcupine, still feels very familiar. In fact it feels like someone handed them a stack of records and told them to "play songs like these guys", without telling them to not mimic them too closely.
Take the opening track "The Great Escape". The guitars start up, then the drums kick in, the first verse begins, and then there's just the guitar and the vocals being spoken. It's at this point that you can count to four and hit the exact moment that everything comes in all at once and the verse explodes in a very sing along manner. One can imagine the anticipation of the crowd at their all-ages show, just waiting for the precise moment to throw their fists in the air and start jumping. It's not that it constantly adheres to a specific formula, it's the fact that it is always just a few inches from being exactly like another song. At one point early on in "The Great Escape" I thought that Dan Adriano came into a Jimmy Eat World song to say "shopping cart" and then go along his merry way.
That's pretty much the course of the rest of the album. It's a lot of fairly mediocre songs that occasionally have a good enough hook to keep someone interested and singing along.
In the end, will Boys Like Girls change or make any significant improvements to the pop punk landscape with this album? No. Will there be people singing along and bouncing uncontrollably at their shows? More than likely.
