Product Reviews
Like many bands on the Victory roster, Thieves and Villains brew up a sound that s simultaneously aggressive and sugary, with punk-pop and emo serving as main influences. South America is a fairly stripped-down record, though, emphasizing straightforward rock arrangements over the stacked, manicured production favored by most of the band s Warped Tour comrades. The result is an album that embraces some tenets of the emo-pop handbook while abandoning others, and it's those scattered differences that help South America establish its own identity. The 13 songs here -- all of them perfectly pleasant and somewhat familiar-sounding -- therefore rely on the arrangements, production, and instrument tones to carve out a unique place in the punk/emo world, and South America ends up being an exercise in not worrying about what you say, but how you say it. ~ Andrew Leahey, Rovi