Since the release of You Say Party! We Say Die!'s first album in 2005, the ante's been upped on their brand of fiery, female-led dance-punk. Blatantly spawned from the Pretty Girls Make Graves/YYYs c. 2004 model of aggro-new wave, their debut, Hit the Floor!, parlayed exclamatory song titles and chic leftist propaganda into a formidable album that dropped at a opportunistic time. The genre hasn't exactly experienced a sea change since, but new acts like Love is All and Be Your Own Pet have necessitated a more nuanced spin for dance party melee albums. Just ask Pretty Girls, Thunderbirds are Now! or Le Tigre-- you can milk one, maybe two, solid records by strictly adhering to the dance-spaz formula, but this fundamentalism ages poorly.
Hit the Floor!, as rank and file as it was, provided the band with a number of potential aesthetic tangents for follow-up Lose All Time. They channeled Pretty Girls' complex histrionics while keeping a stake in gritty garage punk and buoyant Hot Hot Heat-style pop-- it was only a matter of further honing the sound that worked best. Lose All Time codifies these influences into a markedly more consistent effort, though the result's still strangely anti-climactic.
Enthusiasm and the corresponding exclamation points are noticeably lacking on Lose All Time, and the band appears bent on maturing for maturity's sake. That's not to say sloganeering rockers like "5 Year Plan" or "Poison" don't have a pulse, but their breakneck austerity, when stretched over the span of an album, grows dull. "Downtown Mayors Goodnight, Alley Kids Rule!" and "Opportunity", while equipped with their share of explosive basslines and nifty hooks, demonstrate how much the band substitutes rote loud-soft dynamics for more original songwriting. The former even flaunts chorus riffs on an acidic level with Les Savy Fav, but it lacks that band's astute sense of rhythm, conceding instead to a vanilla verse that lackadaisically affixes high-hat sixteenths to a promising bassline.
The story of Lose All Time is about what could have been. Right now this album's a great first draft, something to mull over before flipping these well-trodden ideas on their heads. To their credit, the band tries a few change-ups, most notably the faux-Stars track "Monster" and raw piano ballad "Dance Floor Destroyer". Dance-punk, however, can wear down as quickly as the hand-me-down Zildjian high-hats it features, and YSP!WSD! needs to stop treading water and put together a coup. Almost entirely bereft of Hit the Floor's political and musical quirks, you wouldn't know Lose All Time from a dance-punk Adam-- a shame considering how charming YSP!WSD!'s first impression was.
