The first song on this album sounds so much like The Sea and Cake that I almost turned it off to listen to the Sea and Cake instead. I'm still not sure if I wouldn't have been better off doing just that. Probably not, but this is one puzzling album. These fellas write pretty pop songs and execute the playing and singing of those pretty pop songs cleanly. And maybe that's part of the problem. It's so damn clean. It's like they're afraid to break out and be too durrrrddddy. Everything feels very contained and mannered and a little too secondhand in a sounds-so-much-like-The-Sea-and-Cake-that-I-etc. way. They ba-ba-ba like Pet Sounds on the third track. The trouble is, Black Before Red remind the listener a bit too much of the band that each song sounds like.
And that's all kind of a lot of a shame. Because the lyrics are smart without being smart-assed across the board. And on the couple of songs where they do break free from the shackles of the bands (I assume) they love, things start to cook. Take "Teenage America" for example. This song is probably the weakest lyrically but I don't really care because it'’s a smart, quick pop anthem that sounds like Black Before Red doing the oohs and ahs and yeahs in their own style. And "Spilt Milk Mistake" adds a light country inflection to wonderful effect. "Halliberlin Petroleum" (I detect a lawyer-dictated lawsuit avoidance word change there) wraps political invective in a sweet pop blanket and therefore deserves applause. It might be the prettiest angry political song ever, with the possible exception of "Tramp Down the Dirt". Maybe they just saved the good material for the second half of the record.
But hey-ho, this is a debut album. So the conclusion is that it's not a perfect record, but it definitely shows promise. I hope they harness their originality and take some risks with it on the next album, because that's the only thing that's missing.