Recent Adeline Records recruits Save Your Breath already have pop punk circles in their native UK abuzz, and made the step to do the same in the States with the U.S. release of their debut EP Nothing Worth Having Comes Easy last week. With the credentials of touring with bands like The Wonder Years andrecording a split with Fireworks, the boys of Save Your Breath are already doing alright for themselves in terms of American exposure, and with any luck this EP will be embraced by pop punk fans here as well as it has been across the pond.
Six songs and two exclusive bonus tracks make up the release, each of which is teeming with the bouncy beats, gliding guitar, and overall jaunty jams, fans of the genre expect. Bursting with energy, the tracks of Nothing Worth Having Comes Easy are unquestionably up-tempo and full of heart.
However, as a whole this set of songs felt neither here nor there for us. Without a doubt Save Your Breath is a skilled set of musicians that come across as pristinely polished, but no matter how tight a band is, if the songs constantly stay within the same boundaries of one another, things start to get boring. While there are a few noticeable variations- like the guitar riff that opens up “Not in the Mood for Kiwi”, mini-breakdown of “I Am The Ticket?” and throatier vocals used in “You’ve Got Lizard Blood”, most of these songs run right into each other, making one track hard to distinguish from any other.
The general vibe of this album is very much along the lines of Saves The Day, The Starting Line, and The Wonder Years, though a shine toward Jimmy Eat World shows up in the second bonus track, “Bin Laden Saw Your Slogan T-Shirt and Now He’s Got a Rap Career”.
The first bonus track, “Your Oven’s on Fire”, let’s its drums stand out more than in the other songs, coming across with more strength than before, and is joined by a really neat, spidery and twangy guitar part which later gets swallowed up by all the commotion going on in the rest of the song.
One big complaint we have about this record is the mush mouth quality of our front man, who isn’t exactly enunciating in any of these tracks. However, we can forgive him for that just a little bit because his whine is so on the money with the pop punk we clung to through our teen years. Though we couldn’t entirely understand most of what we were hearing, we did catch a promising lyric in the aforementioned “You’ve Got Lizard Blood”, in which our lead delivers, “You get what you want too much, now you’ve got to give some back or give it up for good” in the form of a round.
Save Your Breath is obviously a band that means what they’re doing and has put the work in, but we feel like this five-piece could have pushed themselves a little more. Nonetheless, Nothing Worth Having Comes Easy is worth checking out for a little infusion of spunk in your day, and seems like a nice addition to the pop punk world.
