For a band comprised of geographically disparate members releasing their first album, Summer Palace shows that Sunny Day Sets Fire know their emotional and sonic niches well. Granted, there's plenty of space to explore between the infinitesimal and the impossibly huge, and there's not much untrod ground in songs about love and nature, but at its best, Palace showcases the band's skill at making small things-- like Mauro Remiddi's mouse-like voice-- rise to meet the enormity of their surroundings. When it goes astray, though, the record reflects the inherent danger contained in the band's name: What begins as simple radiance can spread beyond control if not properly contained.
Palace's muscular, hook-laden jangle-pop underscores its pervasive romanticism, in both senses of the word. First, the definition with a capital "R": Like a chipper Ralph Waldo Emerson, Remiddi seeks to escape the confines of modern life and revel in the simple, solitary joys of the outdoors. On "Stranger", he wants to take a walk, to see "how it feels to be alone," and he notes in "Wilderness" that, in order to comprehend nature, one must "start to see differently, like the painters do." "Teenagers Talking" and "Lack of View" both deal with falling down. In the latter, it's occasioned by "hurricanes and thunders"; in the former, it's a possible outcome of embarrassment.
The anthemic "All Our Songs" also contains the line "everyone's scared to fall," but the song marks Palace's easy transition to the interpersonal definiton of romance, while keeping one eye on the external surroundings. Over rumbling drums, Remiddi sings, "May the darkness in me be the light in you," with a melismatic falsetto emphasis on "light." He's not the world's most emphatic suitor, though, and "Smallest Heart on Earth" veers too close to the Chris Martin/Ben Gibbard realm of overly coy romantic panhandling: "I don't want to bother you, just look what I found." Despite a similar sentiment in "End of the Road" ("If you don't mind, I'd like to get lost with you"), the song more than makes up for it, detouring from its dark twang into a stop-start "Apache" breakdown at its conclusion.
Bits of mischief like that happen regularly on Palace, but occasional indulgences (like the six-minute-plus runtime of "Heart") push the boundaries of Sunny Day's strengths a bit too far. The mid-record ballad "Siamese" grinds momentum to a halt, pushing the already pervasive cuddliness of to the point of patience-testing, and "Brainless" is a goofy Polyphonic Spree/Flaming Lips pastiche that doesn't do the band any favors. "Adrenaline", a squiggly, hyperactive electronic lament to excess energy, is where Sunny Day should start for album two: It's fine to be overwhelmed and anxious, but take a few deep breaths before committing the resulting ideas to song, lest you recreate those same feelings in your listeners.
