Album Review: Burning at Both Ends by Set Your Goals

Set Your Goals' third album is their poppiest to date, but they've still got their punk attitude... 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.

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Continuing to straddle the line between hardcore and pop-punk, Set Your Goals blend melody and drive on their third album, Burning at Both Ends. This combination of sounds is one that the band has been working on since their inception, and the album makes it clear that Set Your Goals has been hard at work refining that sound, adding a level of polish that other melodic hardcore acts don’t often achieve. The core of this lies in their liberal use of infectious singalong choruses and half-time breakdowns that are executed in a way that’s precise without feeling restrained, and is the work of a band that is professional without sounding overproduced.

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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.

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