Formed in 2007, the California pop-punk band The Story So Far has released numerous albums and EP's over their 11 year career. Due to being in the music industry for so long, the band knows exactly what kind of sound they're going for, and is not interested in doing anything experimental with it. The lyrics, the drums, the guitars, and the vocals all remain consistent throughout each album they create. While this consistency isn't necessarily a bad thing, it has made their sound more predictable and stale. The only noticeable difference between their albums would be the production value, which has increasingly gotten more and more stable. Over the years the band has transformed themselves from being rough around the edges into a completely smooth state. Their first album Under Soil and Dirt made them stand out among the pop-punk community due to their hardcore-genre influences and their "in your face" attitude. Their second release What You Don't See follows this formation perfectly, and we can see that the band had recognized their unique sound as well. A year after the success of What You Don't See, the band released their self-titled album The Story So Far which also did exceedingly well. This is due to their fans knowledge of what to expect from them, however it is around this time that they start to lose their edginess. This leads into their new album Proper Dose by using similar elements of their past albums and regurgitating them in order to create something new-ish. Once again that is not to say that Proper Dose isn't a good album, it's just nothing you haven't heard before by The Story So Far.
Proper Dose is a relatively quick listen (around 34 minutes in length) with a track list consisting of 11 songs. Each song has an average playtime of two minutes and thirty seconds; however, they seem a lot shorter. On the album there are only a small handful of songs that are worth listening to, and even then, I feel like they don't hold a candle to what the band has produced in the past. The album's central theme seems to be about drug use, traveling the road, and the loss of love. This drug use seems to be a newer concept to the band because it doesn't appear as heavily on their prior albums. My favorite track on the album "Out of It" utilizes this idea of relying on drugs to cope with life, the lyrics "My appropriate opiate has me out of it" represents this as well.
A key theme about the pop punk genre is that you need to sing about leaving your hometown, missing your friends while you're on the road, and being in love. Each one of these themes are represented on this album with tracks like "Keep This Up", "Upside Down", and "Need to Know." None of these themes for the genre are new to the band or scene, but they do get old super quick. For instance, there are only so many ways you can sing about missing your hometown. Rather than stick with the sound that the band knows far too well, it would have been refreshing to hear the band experiment with it as much as similar artists in the scene have done. Bands like Citizen, Balance and Composure, and Basement are all great examples of how changing your sound can sometimes be for the better.
This regurgitation of sound in the pop-punk scene seems to be the trend in over the last decade. Each band (I'm looking at you Broadside and State Champs) attempts to be the new Blink-182 or the Wonder Years. By watering the genre down so much with such similar sound, I can only stand by and watch the bar drop lower and lower for this genre of music.
Overall Proper Dose receives a score of 5 out of 10 because of the band's consistent sound, and the basic lyrics behind most of their tracks. A large majority of the lyrics on this album rhyme far too well with one another, making them predictable and catchy in all the wrong ways. Hell, the last lyric in each verse of "If I Fall" all rhyme together in an AAA/BBB pattern "line, fine, whine" and "owe, go, grow." It doesn't take a genius to create these lyrics and I felt disappointed that better lyrics weren't created. You can buy this album on vinyl by going to their website, or traveling to any nearby record store. However, I would only buy this album on vinyl as an impulse purchase in order to complete my discography of the band. As far as new listeners to the band, I heavily recommend starting with Under Soil and Dirt or What You Don't See because I feel that those albums are better representations of the band than this new project.
