Slowly Slowly’s fourth album proves that uplifting music and dark, introspective lyrics need not be awkward partners. While tracks such as “Blueprint”, “Forget You” and the slick pop of “Nothing On” are Grade A emo-rock dance-floor fillers, lyrically the record finds vocalist/guitarist Ben Stewart traversing relationship breakdowns (“Hold My Breath”), flawed concepts of romance (“Moving Trains”, featuring Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba), the ups and downs of life as an artist (“Longshot”) and the political games bands have to play in the music industry (“Achilles’ Heel”). The delicate “Papier-Mâché”, meanwhile, is a desperate tale of heartbreak, a metaphor for the way layers of paper may look strong but are still fragile individually (“So tell me again how I’m papier-mâché/A thousand weak layers of crazy insane,” sings Stewart.) If there is light at the end of the tunnel, it comes in the shape of the title track, a stomping, harmony-laden song that finds acceptance rather than despair in the fact that “life’s not linear”.