On Lights and Sounds, Yellowcard clearly attempts to grow beyond the teen punk-pop of their past. Their last album, Ocean Avenue, achieved mainstream popularity without having any significant depth or originality, beyond the fact that the Southern California outfit has a violinist. Lights and Sounds is a different album than Ocean Avenue, but change is not synonymous with growth.
Musically, the band has simply leaned further to the pop side of the already thin punk-pop divide. There is less teenage whine in singer Ryan Key's voice, the instrumentals are finely polished and several of the tracks are power ballads. That's not to say the music is better'it simply adheres more to familiar popular rock formulas than it does to familiar punk formulas. The end result is not original, but it isn't painfully bad either. It is the sonic equivalent of empty calories that happen to be punk-pop flavored.
The band has certainly changed focus lyrically as well. The melodramatic angst and heartbreak has been dialed down (although not completely expunged) in favor of a few quasi-political and social commentaries. The band may have intended to make deep and meaningful statements, and perhaps that qualifies as 'growth.'
However, the lyrics for tracks like 'City of Devils' and 'Two Weeks From Twenty' are neither deep nor meaningful. They are handled vaguely, in order to appeal to as wide an audience as possible. When applied to a song about a breakup, this approach is, at worst, boring.
On the other hand, lyrics like 'We lost another one / That we sent with a gun ... / And there's still no shame / From the man to blame' wraps a serious topic into a trite and trivial package that deserves better. While their intentions may exhibit a level of maturation, it's been well over a year since Green Day covered the same material'and did an immeasurably better job.
Lights and Sounds will satisfy punk-pop fans looking for another fix of their preferred sound and will likely find plenty of airtime on mainstream radio. For a second major-label album, it could certainly sound much worse. But critics are not going to be converted to the Yellowcard camp when the best element of Lights and Sound remains, 'Hey ... they have a violinist!'
