Album Reviews

Best new entry in the Bummer Punk category this month, maybe even this year goes to Spanish Love Songs with their new album, ‘Brave Faces Everyone’. The title alone tells you everything you need to know going into the San Diego based band's third full-length. Brave Faces Everyone... we’re all fucked but in the end, we are going to pull through.

To say that the LA-based quintet wear their feelings on their sleeves, is something of an understatement. But they wear them beautifully. Cuts like ‘Kick’, ‘Beach Front Property’ and ‘Optimism’ see the band taking their particular brand of gruff yet melodic, Menzingers via The Wonder Years pop-punk meets emo and just run with it all the way to the finish line. I mean, any band that can take a line like ‘have you ever felt lower than everyone else?’ and turn it into an anthemic chorus, is doing something right.

In ‘Self-Destruction’ vocalist/guitarist Dylan Slocum utters that ‘it won’t be this bleak forever’, suggesting a light at the end of the tunnel. But that’s immediately followed by a ‘yeah, right’ and you know we aren’t there yet. Lyrically, ‘Brave Faces Everyone’ is a heavy album, filled with stories about broken hearts, drug addiction and depression. But rather than revel in it, Spanish Love Songs are like the man on the album cover. All dressed up for a party, struggling but not quite giving up just yet and still determined to make the best of a shitty situation. And in the process, they ended up with their best album to date.

Track listing:

1. Routine Pain
2. Self – Destruction
3. Generation Loss
4. Kick
5. Beach Front Property
6. Losers
7. Optimism
8. Losers 2
9. Dolores
10. Brave Faces, Everyone