South America

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 -- the mannered (almost caricatured) singing, the shamelessly singable pop hooks, the "us against the world!" lyrics -- while abandoning other facets of the genre. It's those scattered differences that help South America establish its own identity, since Thieves and Villains haven't quite matured into the sort of high-caliber outfit that can transcend the genre that launched it. The 13 songs here -- all of them perfectly pleasant but fairly standard -- 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.