Yearbooks – “See You Next Year” [EP] [Album Review]

Bay Area screamo gets a hell of a lot snappier with Yearbooks’ debut EP See You Next Year. This Oakland four-piece comes with a smattering of members from Californian hardcore bands, combining maturity and stunning cohesion to hammer out six songs that are so achingly well realized it’s hard to believe this is a first release.

Clean guitars echoed with delay and reverb poke through a bass tone that clips like an aggressively recorded garage-band track (that’s a good thing), and while the vocals are cannoned through the din, the drums keep it all together with a deranged, pounding rhythm. All of which lends Yearbooks a heavy anxiety that accents tension while consciously denying and delivering cathartic releases.

The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode titles will probably attract and deter equally, and a 60 second conversation between Whoopi Goldberg and that wiener Crusher kid is a bit emotionally pedantic; but the tunes kill it, so it all works out. Yearbooks hit all the highs with reckless bombast and their jagged brand of melodic hardcore crashes and stutters for a deliciously sizzling quarter of an hour.

Track Listing:

01. Encounter at Farpoint
02. The Naked Now
03. Lonely Among Us
04. Too Short a Season
05. When the Bough Breaks
06. We’ll Always Have Paris

Run Time: 16:22
Release Date: March 22, 2014

Check out the song “Encounter at Farpoint”