Set Your Goals - Burning at Both Ends reviews
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| Popmatters |
 When Set Your Goals made the jump from Eulogy to Epitaph for their sophomore effort, This Will be the Death of Us, they separated themselves from the pop-punk crowd; combining saccharine sweet melodies with aggressive hardcore is a fine tight rope to walk, but it’s one that the San Francisco sextet did well. The positively received disc and their exhaustive touring schedule led to the much anticipated release of their third album, Burning at Both Ends. Unfortunately, the promise set forth on Death of Us has not come to fruition.
The problem is not that much of the material on Burning at Both Ends is bad. On the contrary, there are several solid tracks and almost no terrible ones. A good portion of the disc, however, is just plain mediocre or leaves you with a feeling of musical blue balls. For example, the promising and blistering melodic hardcore opening of “Exit Summer” bleeds into a blah, too pop by half-chorus. Nostalgic posturing litters the disc, including tracks with lines like “I always want to feel this young” and a song about losing one’s virginity (“The Last American Virgin”). The Bay Area rockers do their own I Love the ‘80s episode, dropping references to Van Halen, Punky Brewster, Kiss, and Friday the 13th in “Product of the ‘80s”. The boys remind us just how old they are pointing out they grew up without DVDs, MP3s, or plasma screens. Can you imagine?!...full text |
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| Rocksound |
| This keenly-anticipated third album is Set Your Goals’ poppiest to date, with the rougher melodic hardcore ridges slightly sanded down. This isn’t to say they’ve morphed into The All-American Rejects; the galloping punk, chunky riffs and gang vocals are all still present and correct in the likes of ‘Exit Summer’, opener ‘Cure For Apathy’ and ‘Illuminated Youth’, while ‘Happy New Year’’s bitter farewell to 2010 is about as saccharine as cold coffee. They’re back in irresistibly anthemic form, with just the right blend of punk attitude and pop genius. With ‘Burning At Both Ends’, the Bay Area sextet have further underlined their second-to-none pop-punk pedigree....full text |
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| Underthegunreview |
Every band seems to face a wealth of pressure when approaching their Sophomore release. Theoretically, your debut is filled with a lifetime of effort and experiences, but your second release is much more rushed, generally created out of, at most, a couple years of experience. They call it the “Sophomore slump,” but I think it is really only the first test for bands. If your first album is the accumulation of a lifetime of dreaming, the second release is your first actual platform to display your skill. Once you do that, if your fans still stand, you are faced with the much tougher decision of what to do next. Some choose to “stay true” and carry the torch that has gotten them this far, others go the way of the “alternative” artist and become more introspective than the most melodramatic teenagers (generally being the one that inspires them), and still others simply call it quits or tour until people stop caring. Set Your Goals have two full lengths behind them (as well as 3 EPs and a wealth of touring) and stand at this very fork in the road on Burning At Both Ends (out June 27 via Epitaph).
Much like their previous releases, Burning At Both Ends is an album that plays perfectly as an entire work, as well as individual tracks. It is this continued dedication to crafting each and every release so tightly that has always drawn me to Set Your Goals. Even though some may call this hybrid genre of pop punk and hardcore a bit “simple” at times, SYG push themselves to change how they present their band on every album and it all begins on Burning with the anthemic “Cure For Apathy.” The song’s genuine spirit and energy will instantly call to mind Mutiny‘s “Work In Progress,” only with nearly six years of experience added into the mix. You can feel the effect time has had not only on the themes and lyrics, but the way the band feels sonically as well. Determined and refined, yet still young and abrasive....full text |
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