Despite a discouraging and somewhat bizarre cover photo, the album Adventures in Real Time by Dylan Gardner contains a variety of upbeat and fun songs students will enjoy. 

The album begins, appropriately, with the light-hearted song “Let’s Get Started,” which creates a fast paced, vintage theme the entire album follows.

Gardner is also a very similar artist to the famous Beatles so much so that Sasha Glenn on The Daily of the University of Washington described him as an ‘incarnation’ of the boy band.

The hopeful and cheery tune to the music is almost contagious to listeners as they hear songs such as “I Think I’m Falling For Something,” and the beat continues throughout the album.

The album takes a turn when the upbeat music suddenly becomes depressing and slow with the song “The Actor.” The music quickly shifts from cute lyrics about love and falling for someone to being left by a loved on. An example of these depressing and low lyrics include, “I am the soul I am the whole/ I am the actor/ I’m the disaster who can’t read his lines.”

“Gardner’s music is the kind of music you would hear in skate and surf shops around the west coast, from Pac Sun to Vans,” Jackson Clarke and Julianne Werner said on the Bellarmine Prep Lion news site.

Overall, while some of Gardner’s songs can be depressing and slow, the overall tone of the album is upbeat and has a new, refreshing sound that is unlike common music being released today.