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 while abandoning others, and it's those scattered differences that help South America establish its own identity. The 13 songs here -- all of them perfectly pleasant and somewhat familiar-sounding -- 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. ~ Andrew Leahey