The All-American Rejects - Kids in the Street (Deluxe Edition) (2012)

Four years on from When the World Comes Down -- and their fourth record overall -- All-American Rejects return with Kids in the Street, an album that simultaneously finds the emo-lite quartet maturing and embracing the sugar rush of pop. Certainly, Kids in the Street finds AAR performing with a musical dexterity they didn't quite have a decade earlier, when they were just kids creating big noise, seeming almost to stumble upon their hooks, whereas everything here is purposeful, a cleanly efficient machine churning out catchy, insistent pop spangled with hints of ‘80s synth pop. Such production flourishes add depth that the perfectly pretty introspective acoustic ballads don’t quite manage to muster, yet those slower tunes do highlight the range All-American Rejects achieve here, their richest and most varied album to date.~Kids in the Street Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine