Tracklisting:
1. Awakening
2. Surface Of The Sun
3. Always Summer
4. Here I Am Alive
5. Sleep In The Snow
6. A Vicious Kind
7. Telescope
8. Rivertown Blues
9. Ten
10. Southern Air

Don’t let the title fool you. You won’t find a single banjo or hint of a twang on Yellowcard’s new album, “Southern Air.” This exciting and inspiring new album captures the joy, hope, romance and pain of youth and summer in ten hard-hitting tracks. There is a certain rarely amazing quality to how lead singer, Ryan Key’s vocals neatly float on top of Sean Mackin’s beautifully majestic violin melodies that complement the heavy sound of lead guitarist, Ryan Mendez, and drummer, Longineu W. Parsons III. Together, the members of Yellowcard have created a sound that makes you feel a primal desire to roll the windows down, take the top off, put your shades on and just drive down a highway singing along. A lyric from this album perhaps captures the emotions of nearly all of the songs on this album: “It’s always summer in my heart and in my soul.”

I have to say, unlike pretty much every other album I’ve listened to in my life, there is not a single song on this album that I would skip over. Each one carries with it a slightly different perspective on the same thing. Even the saddest song on the album, “Ten,” my personal favorite, sounds incredibly summery; quite a bit like summerset. The title track, “Southern Air,” captures the slow-paced but never dull quality of life in the South. There is no experience quite like driving through the forests of the American South, feeling the thick air slap against your face, and yet, this song captures that experience perfectly. The opening song, “Awakening,” perhaps unsurprisingly, brings me to one summer when I was a kid and I would wake up every morning, so excited to go to the pool, singing “Ocean Avenue,” while simultaneously evoking the emotions of that moment post-break-up when you realize that you will survive and be better for the experience.

Overall, even though this album is coming out near the end of the summer, you HAVE to get it. Let the kid inside of you come out and enjoy the summer sun, while satisfying the angsty teenager inside you that you never quite got rid of, and feeding that eternally hopeful twenty-something that you thought you would never lose. Music should be a tool to increase your humanity by allowing you to more fully delve into emotions and experiences that make you who you are. Yellowcard’s “Southern Air” does exactly that. Be prepared to feel the warmth of an eternal summer when this album releases on August 14, 2012.