The Dangerous Summer – War Paint

The brand of pop-rock Maryland quartet The Dangerous Summer specialise in can be something of a tough nut to crack. It’s a saturated market as it stands, and is veritably full to bursting with mediocrity. With so few bands showing enough quality and consistency to emerge head and shoulders above the pack, they make a solid go of it on new album War Paint, which builds up enough goodwill during its finest moments to make forgivable its weaker ones.

There’s a lot of shimmering guitar work and familiar topics lyrically here (see ‘Siren’ and ‘I Should Leave Right Now’), and there’s immediately a lot to like about War Paint on first impression, in a comfortable sort of way. The ace in the hole that goes a long way to setting them aside from their contemporaries is frontman AJ Perdomo, whose husky, earnest vocal stylings make for a welcome change of pace from many similar bands’ more nasal, whiny efforts. The obvious highlight of the record comes in the form of ‘No One’s Gonna Need You More’, which is a slickly executed nugget of polished, musically proficient pop-punk that packs the kind of instantly memorable chorus You Me At Six could have stood to have written a few more of on last year’s lacklustre Sinners Never Sleep.

All in all, War Paint is a record which generally makes an admirable job of avoiding many of the formulaic leanings that tend to afflict their genre of choice, and the few momentary lapses that do crop up seem pretty insignificant compared to some of the highs they manage to hit in between. Solid stuff.