You Say Party! We Say Die!

You may find yourself tempted to listen to the self-styled connoisseurs and genre-warriors who are content to simply label YOU SAY PARTY! WE SAY DIE! Vancouver's dance-punk saviors. If you do, get ready for a wake-up call. Lose All Time, dropping March 20th, 2007 on Paper Bag Records, proves that the band has much more to say than a two-dimensional genre tag suggests.

Lose All Time is the sophomore album from a band ready to take the world on their terms. With a wealth of touring and songwriting experience now under their collective belt, Lose All Time is a more confident and mature album that emphasizes the hydra-headed contribution of all five members: Becky Ninkovic (Lead Vocals), Stephen O'Shea (Bass), Krista Loewen (Keyboards), Devon Clifford (Drums) and Derek Adam (Guitar).

The premise of Lose All Time is as follows: to snapshot being in a place in one's life where time is no longer of any consequence. Being a workhorse of a touring band has removed YOU SAY PARTY! WE SAY DIE! from the context of water cooler routine. Both liberating and isolated, the unique experience of touring elevates creativity and survival to perpetual watchwords, a state of mind independent of schedules and habit. So removed is the band from the imposition of the working world's clock that it's common for any one of their disoriented number to be overheard asking what time, day or even month it is. Lose All Time expertly captures this displaced feeling.

The album is a brilliant, spastic celebration of hyperactive outbursts and meditative moments. Like Lose All Time's concept, the bubbling joy of this music strives to touch something unrestrained by time. The careening beats of "Moon" and kittenish keys of first single "Monster" intertwine like headlights on Lose All Time's midnight highway. "Dancefloor Destroyer" climbs inexorably, building to its infectious refrain. But contrasted with the band's stable of reliably body-moving numbers is a surprising and refreshingly poised step forward; songs like "You're Almost There" with its piano glitter and "Giant Hands," with its complex drum patterns, are sonorous, mid-tempo statements. Clearly the album is a declaration from a band at the top of their songwriting game.

But the band's relationship might have ended with late night skate park odysseys or the formation of a browbeating bicycle gang had O'Shea not overheard Ninkovic singing to herself and asked her to join the band. Time and circumstance have since streamlined You Say Party! We Say Die! into its reigning, laser guided incarnation, an anthemic, stomping, post-everything insistence that "If you are doing what you really love then life feels like a party. Don't stop. Do it 'till it kills you."

Lose All Time was produced and engineered by Shawn Cole at Lab Monkey studios.