Album Review: Daybreak
Album: Day Break
Artist: Saves the Day
Genre: Punk Rock, Alternative Rock
Review date: 3/15/2019
Album drop date: 9/13/2011
11 songs, 40:34 minutes
Lyrical content: 7
Theme: 8
Production quality: 4
Song development: 5
Context in genre: 5
A decade and half a dozen albums into their career and Saves the Day made an album about one of the hardest concepts to come to terms with, acceptance. Daybreak is an album that shows emotional maturity in a vain singular to the band’s discography. While the music still has that adolescent emo energy, a lot of the subject matter and slower tracks surrender angst for peace of mind. After many band-member swaps Chris continues to unify the group over one vision and under his clear and versatile vocals.
Daybreak was planned out as the finale of a trilogy. Chris was going through a lot and the album series was meant to serve as a therapeutic channel for his discontent with life. While Daybreak marked the end of a trilogy it was far from marking the end of the band, or Chris’s life journey. At one point in the album Chris is accepting that ‘living without love, isn’t the life I need’. However, life doesn’t end there, and change is hard, in fact it’s so hard for Chris that at one point he laments that ‘I’m dying trying to change’. This real and authentic struggle shines through the vibrant punk rock album and proves that Saves the Day still has a lot of growing up to do. As do us all.
While Saves the Day is usually saved by Chris’s voice the band depended more on the well-oiled guitar work this time around. Take the opener for instance. The band made an impressively bold statement with an eleven-minute opus. What came across as the most extravagant part of the song however was the multiple energetic and fun beat switches. Inside of one section of the song was a mid-tempo guitar loop and then another would speed things up a bit just to be slowed down by a third transition. Floating in the back, and marking the distinctive sound of each transition, was the crafty guitar work. Despite the excellent guitar playing on Daybreak, the most compelling songs down the track list came from songs that stripped back the instrumentation, and left Chris to do his thing. For instance, on album highlight ‘Undress Me’ Chris’s clear and sensual vocals are front and center while the acoustic strings bleed romance across the track. The album would’ve been a standout in their discography if this balance of subtle instrumentation and evocative vocals was prevalent from top to bottom on Daybreak.
In addition to the weird balance of loud instrumentation and Chris’s signature vocals was the mixing. The album suffered too much from lazy mixing. For instance, on ‘Deranged and Desperate’, while it had a lot of endearing qualities, the guitars featured on that track nearly drowned Chris’s vocals out entirely. His voice wasn’t deep enough to overcome the loud production on a lot of the more charged up moments, and the songs suffered in quality as a result. After over a decade of band members coming and going maybe the mixing misshape was a result of simply bad band chemistry.
This wasn’t Saves the Day best album, nor will it contribute a lot to the band’s eventual greatest hits album. But, the content on Daybreak showcases the group in new form, adult form. If there was ever a time where Saves the Day redefined their sound as not just punk-rock it was on Daybreak. There were plenty of great moments on this album that would make day-one fans proud. If they’re ever looking for less of the same, and bit of experimentation, they should first turn to Daybreak.
