SeeMoreGlass is making some sweet tunes out in Ohio. Their latest album
Roaring Paper Spring is a beautifully realized selection of modern pop-punk heat-seekers looking to zero in on the plaintive thump of your broken heart. These songs all feel solidly constructed and the album has a compelling ark to it, with the choruses and emotions becoming more eudaimonic and oddly hopeful as it progresses.
Roaring Paper Spring has the feel of a classic Wonder Years record, in that it is both smartly and carefully constructed and powerfully hooky and infectious. Also, like a Wonder Years record, it can be overwhelmingly in its pinning sadness. "Missing You (From Halfway 'Round The World)" especially has a wholesome, tearjerking quality to it that will make you feel like a golden retriever sitting by the kitchen door during a rainstorm wondering when (or if!) you person is going to come home. Songs like the title track do an incredible job of pairing giant, '80s-indebted hooks with expressions of paralyzing and relatable anxieties and shepherding it all along with an appropriate quotient of "wah-ohs. Latter numbers like "Cory, What If We Don't Know Anything?" manage to really rip it up with dyspeptic lyricism and chunky, melocore riffage, capturing some of that oft-lost American peace-punk angst as well as expressing a convincing desire to make a better world possible. Something unexpected that I appreciate about the latter half of
Roaring Paper Spring are its country and folk influences. Beginning with the big Americana rock chords of "This Is No Dream, This Is Really Happening" the album exudes a kind of organic, heartland warmth that reaches a sober epoch on the gospel tinted "The Stirring Of A Breeze" only to explode on the country-soul, spur-stomp of "Hope And Time Wait For No One"- a song that sounds like it could have been ghostwritten by Craig Finn and Jakob Dylan and then passed off to The Starting Line who executed it without extracting any of its rural, rust-belt DNA. And did I mention that singer N. Patrick Phile has a set of pipes? Because holy crap does he ever! He is absolutely shouting over the back of the cheap seats and his voice is shamelessly spilling out into the front lobby and beyond.
Roaring Paper Spring is an exhilarating listen from cover to credits.
