3 out of 5

Label: Expert Work Records

Produced by: Vince Tennant (recorded by, mixed by)

Proving how subjective tastes are, sometimes when you do something that isn’t wholly original, I’m here to knock you down a peg, review-wise. But then sometimes I’m here to praise you for the same thing: you’re not doing something new, but damn are you doing it well.

Sweetheart reeks of “we all like cool music, let’s play cool music together” syndrome. For this dual-guitarred foursome, those likes seemed to encompass screamo / emo / hardcore punk, as I get rather an exact blend of Blood Brothers manicness and the gentle heft of Eyes of Autumn (or perhaps early Sunny Day, if I should make references outside of my tiny circle of my own likes); the album title / song titles – and a general preference for calling things “tight” – is also indicative of the aforementioned syndrome. And while that can, and often does, amount to flash-in-the-pans that sound as facile as the reason for playing together in the first place, Sweetheart’s members all seem to be putting in just a little bit extra to the formula: lyrics, production, song composition, album sequencing – there’s thought here, and hardly any sense of posturing.

The music is mostly a slice of the two / three bands I’ve mentioned – sections of spazzed hardcore with shouts sit against loud emo passages, though these err more towards the yearning side of emo than the whiny side (early emo versus latter-day emo, perhaps). Notable are the varying song lengths, bouncing from a few minutes to 6, 7+. This is part of the band showing their desire to do more: arguably, the shorter songs are the, er, tightest ones; Sweetheart rather purposefully avoids slowbuilds for their longer tunes, moreso stretching out their dynamics with a slower pace. So the long songs are good, though maybe not entirely successful at justifying their length versus the other tracks. Thankfully, the album sequencing spaces things out so you’re not stuck pondering this for any long period before some more arresting riff comes through.

Ultimately, you might emerge from ‘The Unbearable Tightness Of Being’ with more of a feeling about the band than any single song stuck in your head. But even with different RIYL references filtering through, and perhaps the urge to go listen to those RIYLs, it doesn’t – for me, at least – negate the feeling the album gave me, making it something to which I look forward returning.