Last year, Turnover shocked a lot of fans with Magnolia. It was a slower, moodier venture than their previous self-titled EP, which showed a young band anxious to for people to hear their loud, raucous pop-punk songs. Magnolia was a more varied affair, with pop-punk songs like “Shiver” and “Seedwong” juxtaposed with alternative-styled slowburners like “Daydreaming” and “Bloom.” The best comparison would probably be the jump from Saves the Day’s classic Through Being Cool to the more emo-influenced, yet no less classic, Stay What You Are. Their latest release, the three-song Blue Dream EP, carries on in this vein.
The whole EP is fairly downtempo, in generally, and their quietest outing yet. While the end of the Brand New tribute “Disintegration” and the towering chorus of “Read My Mind” get loud (albeit in wholly different ways), most of the EP is as soft as it is slow. But it’s not a bad sound for the band – “Disintegration,” the band’s heaviest outing to date, makes excellent use of its crescendo, “Read My Mind” has a shoegazy bridge that’d never be expected of the band that wrote “Solitude,” and “Bella Donna” could be a B-side from The Weakerthans’ Reconstruction Site. That’s a good thing, a very good thing. The other thing that’s carried over from Magnolia is Austin Getz‘s newer vocal style. On their self-titled EP, he shouted his words like each one was the most important thing he’d ever said. He hardly sounds like the same person anymore – which is somewhat expected, given how young he was then. His voice is a bit softer now, and sounds more natural. His shouts at the climax of “Disintegration,” then, are a huge shock, and a great contrast from his more subdued crooning over the rest of the release.
While each of the songs shows off a different strength, however, it’s difficult to defend the EP as cohesive. It’s a double-edged sword, as they say: each song sounds like it could be performed by a different band, proving Turnover more versatile than the majority of their peers, but it comes off as a compilation of three different singles by three different bands. Nonetheless, whichever path they choose to take, they’ll undoubtedly execute it flawlessly, if Blue Dream is anything to go by.