The Young Veins: Take a Vacation!

The Young Veins: Take a Vacation!
The least shocking fact of all time might be that The Young Veins are from California. It’s easy to compare them to sun-soaked West Coast power-popsters before them like Phantom Planet and Rooney among others. But what is surprising is that the Young Veins are made up of former members of Panic! at the Disco.
Panic! at the Disco was the epitome of Hot Topic. Their music was perfectly tailored to fit into skinny jeans and boys wearing make up. The Young Veins, while not exactly NOT a cookie cutter band, seem to be the exact opposite. On their debut album, Take a Vacation!, the band apes the melodies of The Beach Boys while using the retro sound of the British invasion.
While a lot of people will write off what the Young Veins are doing as being “nothing new”, I am not so quick to judge. Pop rarely gets reinvented because it does not need to be. The Young Veins essentially make the perfect pop record on Take a Vacation!. The album’s lead single and opening track, “Change” starts off with a guitar sound ripped directly from The Shins‘ “So Says I” before keyboard Nick White of Tilly and the Wall fame comes in with his retro-organ sound. The track’s vocal harmonies are so tight, you would swear you were listening to Herman’s Hermits. While the lyrics are nothing to write home about (ex. “Now she begs for money/no one calls her honey), they do not need to be when the track is this poppy.
What’s amazing is that, “Change” is just the beginning of the poppiness. Nearly every track on the album sounds like it could be a single.
Rating: 8.5/10
MP3: The Young Veins “Change”
Buy: iTunes or Insound!

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