Mutiny!

On Set Your Goals' debut album, Mutiny!, the Bay Area outfit puts aggressive dual guitar crunch right next to singalong melodic goodness and gang chorus backdrops galore. Obviously taking influence from the likes of Lifetime and CIV (their name, after all, references a 1995 CIV album), Set Your Goals boast their own sound while taking the best elements of bands like the Movielife and New Found Glory (mostly back when NFG still had "A" attached to their name). The album gets off to a somewhat misleading start with an acoustic strum akin to blink-182's calmer moments before building into an abrupt explosion of electric power and force. From here, the band never lets up through 11 tracks that in 30 minutes make this a remarkably refreshing and highly enjoyable album. Set Your Goals play with so much pure exuberance, passion, energy, and positive conviction that they remind tired ears what can be so great and engaging about simple punk music in the first place. They successfully straddle the line between melodic hardcore and pop-punk without falling into either's pitfalls of standoffish superiority or whiny sugar overkill. Mutiny! is just the perfect combination of fun and smarts that otherwise largely seems to have been forgotten in the mid-2000s punk scene. This record can simultaneously serve as the soundtrack to high school-era car trips and as a reminder to slightly older listeners that unaffected enthusiasm in music is still possible. Mutiny! is proof.