Lead guitarist Paul Marc Rousseau is on his second release with the band, and he continues to excel at writing fun and sometimes brilliantly catchy melodies. Musically, the record is a straight continuation of This Is How The Wind Shifts. Concept albums are usually more daunting than regular affairs, but like the parallel tales of its predecessor, I Am Alive has a simple idea that’s executed well and requires little extra effort to enjoy. But they never seem like afterthoughts and they’re often very cleverly integrated into the lyrics. They range from the whole concept of the song (“Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory” clearly references and identifies The Masquerade venue in Atlanta, GA) to just mainly serving as Easter eggs for people who are familiar with the town. The band goes so far as to add in field recordings and sounds from each location into the songs, and references to landmarks are often included to more clearly identify the city in question. Based around the idea of the band touring North America, the album is divided into four parts: Borealis, Austeralis, Zephyrus, and Eurus (basically more pretentious names for North, South, West, and East), and each song represents a city in either Canada or the United States.
IAAIEIT is the band’s third concept album, and the second of those albums to reject the idea of a conventional story. But a lack of change means the group has had much time to perfect the formula, and perfect it they have – the band found on I Am Alive In Everything I Touch is the most mature and focused iteration of Silverstein we’ve seen yet. The band has not been blessed by musical diversity ten years later, they’re still peddling the same aggressive verses and catchy choruses as they always have over three labels and seven albums. But it’s something that I can be amazed by in retrospect, especially when nearly all of their former peers have either broken up or are already on their reunion tours. Silverstein’s longevity is not something I myself can honestly claim to be surprised by – after all, when the seminal screamo band first released their renowned masterpiece Discovering the Waterfront in 2005, I was too busy listening to Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance to notice their existence (wonderful bands, but they were about the extension of my musical palate as a 5th grader). Review Summary: Seven albums and over ten years into their career, Silverstein show us that they are very much alive.
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