Synth Single Review: “Taking Sides” by Saturday AM

by Karl Magi

Saturday AM’s “Taking Sides” explores the painful side of love. The song begins as piercing synth lines intermingle with minor-key tension while a storming guitar charges forward. The drums pound as Aaron Boyd’s voice reaches out with ferocious feeling, encapsulating loss and struggle. Matt Freeland’s guitar cries out with tempestuous emotion before ricocheting drums support Aaron Boyd’s gutsy vocal expression and the bass throbs beneath.

The guitar slices into the music with assured intensity as the vocals soar with fierce energy and the low end batters relentlessly. Matt Freeland’s guitar tears through the track with sinewy force while Boyd propels the vocals, seizing me with his commanding performance. The rhythm becomes an attacking wall as the vocals climb with pain and a raging guitar tide churns triumphantly. As Aaron Boyd’s voice drifts into the distance, the low end strikes once more and the music fades.

While waiting for the song’s subject to return, our storyteller confesses that “It came on suddenly, wrote everything I couldn’t say,” capturing the thoughts that drifted through him with his “heart ripped open.” To him, it was like reliving the past, with all the games they played to “hide ourselves away and destroy the signs in our way.” They would do anything to “feel the blood rise, like bringing a knife into a gunfight.”

The narrator insists they will stay alive while “drawing lines and taking sides,” pretending they are fine and telling themselves yet another lie. He reflects that “it’s like hell but like home, the only one I’ve known,” before asking the question that lingers painfully: “If this is love, then tell me why it hurts so bad? Why do I keep coming back to try?”