So, I'm going to be posting an album review once a week.

All the albums are ones that I've deemed the "perfect," album. My reasons for an album being perfect are as follows.

⋅ Its one where you can listen all the way through without skipping a track.
⋅ Its an album you pretty much know every single line to.
⋅ Its the album you don't listen to for years and then one day you hear it and you just sing along at the top of your lungs to it.

and to be a perfect album, it needs to end with a bang.

The first album I'm going to review starts off with a single strum of a guitar

"This song will become the anthem of your underground..."

"Stay What You Are" by Saves The Day is hands down my favorite album of theirs and is my first in a series of Perfect Album reviews.

"Stay What You Are" is a very upbeat pop-punkish album with an emo* sensibility layered with the classic, often gory, lyrics. Most of the songs don't exceed three minutes and I find that most of the albums on my list are under forty minutes. For some reason I love when an album doesn't jump around or have any filler and this album gets right to the point each time.

If you were in high school when this record came out then it was in fact an anthem. Chris Conley's lyrics still holds so much weight even when you're well past the age of teen angst.

A slow, very haunting intro kicks the album off with the song "At Your Funeral", which provides you with everything you'd expect from Saves The Day. If you don't know who saves the day is, please make this the first record of their your purchase. They are one of the endless wonderful bands that have come out of New Jersey(along side bands like My Chemical Romance and the ever-awesome and soon to be reviewed Thursday)

Though every song on this album is wonderful, there are the obvious stand outs. For me their opener, "At Your Funeral" followed by "Jukebox Breakdown", "As Your Ghost Takes Flight", "All I'm Losing Is Me", and "This Is Not An Exit" are the ones that mean the most to me.

I was introduced to this album during a transitional phase in my musical tastes--from my heavy metal/hardcore to the softer side of things with what was later deemed Emo*. I remember sitting up late one night in the Catskill Mountains with my girlfriend at the time, watching the video for "Freakish" and thinking how weird it was to see a music video filled with muppets. Two of my close friends and her had gotten into a huge fight in the den of the cabin we were staying in, and after the fight ended her and I were in the room alone. We popped in a Vagrant records dvd and watched music videos from that label all night long.

(Side note: It was here that I was introduced to Dashboard Confessional as well as The Get Up Kids)

Click here for the video.

With "Jukebox Breakdown" it was always me pretending to be the super romantic kid that I could never amount to. "If you've got a quarter you can stick in my neck and I'll sing whatever song you want for whatever mood you're in." That line always gave me the impression that I could be John Cusack whenever I wanted, only I'd personally sing it to whomever my affection was directed at; not use a boom box and "your eyes," to woo them.

"As Your Ghost Takes Flight" is just plain gory fun for me. I don't care who you are, but to have a really intense, sarcastic song about nailing a person to a wall would seem great to any 17 year old, angry white kid from the suburbs. For example, "I should've had my hammer and a few rusty spikes to nail you on a wall and use bottles to catch your blood and display you for the neighbors so they know your time had come."

"All I'm Losing Is Me" is just groovy. I love this one purely because of how it sounds. It's packed with a great chorus, a guitar solo, and really, really catchy hooks. It's on this song that the progression from underground punk band to a more refined pop-punk band is really seen, and this is strictly based off how the guitars are handled.

Though upbeat in tempo, most of the lyrics have really haunting undertones. As much as I sing along to every single second of this album, there's a deep sense of sorrow that comes with it. The eventual break-up with said girlfriend, the obvious, at times almost John Hugh's level of teen angst that drips off of it...with lines such as "Well here I am don't know how to say this, only thing I know is awkward silence, your eyelids close when your around me to shut me out."

What seventeen year old boy wouldn't be drawn to that when his heart's broken?

I know this isn't as much a review of the album from a music standpoint as it is just how the album made me feel. Music has a very lasting impact on our emotions, and how we feel. "Stay What You Are" has a very strong place in my heart based solely off of who gave it to me and the time in my life that I listened to it for the first time.

"This is Not An Exit," is the one song that still resonates the most with me today. Back when most of us still had AOL as our means to the world wide web, I had first started dating my girlfriend at the time. One day I had seen a line in her AOL profile from a song I could never place...it wasn't until we had broken up that one day while hearing this song, I heard the line

"Despair could ravage you if you turn your head around to look down the path that's lead you here, cause what can you change?"

* As a note, I'm not throwing the term emo around loosely. emo was a music style that pretty much ceases to be these days because it was a snapshot in alternative music history. Not quite punk, not quite pop, emo was one of the first times a music genre was created around the demographic the songs played to. It was a group of boys singing about girls, to other boys. It was about heartbreak and the fact that "emo" male's (emo is short for emotional) do exist. Now a days its just been bastardized to be a general term for something that's trendy or sucks, and sadly thats not the proper usage of the word. Plus for the record, most emo bands have long since broken up or totally changed their style of music.

(See: The promise ring, Texas is the reason, Sunny day real estate, Dashboard confessional, Saves the day, The Get up kids etc.)