Transit - Keep This To Yourself

Keep It To Yourself is miles ahead of their debut This Will Not Define Us, and only a few years removed.

There is a passage in a book I’m reading that proclaims that those who carry their music as emotionally as the hearts on their sleeve tend to find stable relationships hard going. The emotional spectrum they say, is too polarizing to remain somewhere in the middle- you’re either all in, or all out. Taking many pages from Lifetime’s Hello Bastards, Saves the Day’s Can’t Slow Down and the Get Up Kids Four Minute Mile, Keep It To Yourself is the kind of record you cannot go in to half-hearted.

Boston, Mass, with its cold streets and winter nights, is remarkable inspiration fitting for the topical ground covered. From the opening salvo of “Dear Anyone” to the re-recorded “Please, Head North”, Transit proudly wears their intentions with great urgency. It’s melodic and accessible, but with out the plastic buoyancy that listeners often associate with the term “pop punk”. Before you get visions of The Wonder Years and more sugary filling, Transit owe their lineage to the grittier, more abrupt type of music played well by the aforementioned Lifetime and early Get Up Kids; plenty of self-reflection cut with unconventional song structures and melodies. “Hope This Finds You Well” and “A Living Diary” are every bit listenable as they are directly affecting. It’s like when you listen to “Anne Arbour”, “Ostrichsized” and “Bobby Truck Tricks,” you can pick up the positive musical qualities that make these songs appealing, but there is an underlining intangibility to it that immediately separates it from an All Time Low song or a Simple Plan effort.

Ultimately, it is the intangibles that make Transit great- a sense of urgency perhaps? A better understanding of how to make an emotional song without it being sappy or trite? It all permeates through Keep It To Yourself leaving it with a more long term appeal. On the flipside, it isn’t quite as immediate as their Stay Home EP- there is this one lacking, nagging issue with Keep It To Yourself that I wrestled with for a few listens. I only realized that it was missing the song “Stay Home”, which by far is still the band’s best song to date. The full length seems to waver a little towards the end- not quite running out of steam, but certainly not as eventful as the first half (until the glorious closer, “Love ___”, asking of all things, “why is the world so sad?”).

Keep It To Yourself is miles ahead of their debut This Will Not Define Us, and only a few years removed. Rarely do songs about pain and heartache come across as this uplifting. These anthems will ring long after the last heart is broken.

(Run For Cover Records)