It’s a little hard to believe that Best Intentions is We Are The In Crowd’s full length debut album; the Poughkeepsie, NY quintet are so well established in the scene at this point that it feels like they’ve been here forever. Since signing with Hopeless in 2009, they’ve toured virtually nonstop, climbing from the tiny Skullcandy Stage on 2010’s Vans Warped Tour to a main stage appearance at this year’s Bamboozle, stopping everywhere in America six times in between—or at least it feels that way. But while We Are The In Crowd might seem eminently familiar at this point, they’ve still got a few tricks up their sleeves.

From the start, We Are The In Crowd’s conceit has been male and female co-lead vocalists, each telling their side of the story, he-said-she-said style. It’s a formula that, when well executed, opens all sorts of possibilities for interplay between the singers, from traditional duets to line-by-line trade-offs to the sort of finish-each-others’-sentences quick wit that harkens back to Run-DMC. Taylor Jardine and Jordan Eckes take a stab at each of these and more throughout the course of Best Intentions; their winning personalities make it work without feeling kitsch.

Jardine can play the prototypically sprightly pop-punk pixie when the song calls for it and does so capably on tracks like the ripping “Better Luck Next Time”. Hayley Williams seems to be the go-to lazy comparison for any female pop-punk singer these days, but Jardine’s voice is so close in tone and range at times as to be near-indistinguishable from the Paramore majordomo’s circa Riot. That said, Jardine tends to sound a little more full-throated and bass heavy when taking on ballads. Her softer side hadn’t gotten much play to date, which makes tracks like the soulful, sad “You’ve Got It Made” and the mid-tempo Hall And Oates-biting “All Or Nothing” such pleasant surprises.

Then there’s the case of “Kiss Me Again”, a straightforward love song tailor-made for high school movie prom scenes, with a soaring Jardine refrain that falls maybe half a twang short of a mid-90s Shania Twain megahit. It sounds like nothing else on Best Intentions (or, for that matter, anything else in the band’s catalog) and seems like a bald-faced bid for pop radio play. It’s also really well done. Sure to be divisive amongst the Crumbs, its presence here raises questions about the band’s vision for its future; the name “We Are The In Crowd” has always been tongue-in-cheek, but there’s no tongue anywhere near this chaste ode to swoony romanticism and radio pop formalism.

Eckes, for his part, holds his own from the moment he bursts in to interrupt Jardine on the first verse of opening track and lead single, “Rumor Mill,” a blast of spry pop-punk with a killer chorus and the sort of propulsive backbeat that begs for air drumming. It’s maybe his finest moment to date, with a palpable desperation to his opening snarl before he settles in to man the lead on verse two. Elsewhere, that bite reemerges in the bridge of “You’ve Got It Made,” a bit of lovely friction along the edges of Jardine’s smooth lead. He also gets the opening lines on the album’s best track, the melancholy breaking-up-is-hard-to-do lament “See You Around, even taking a bit of the refrain to himself. While they are ostensibly co-vocalists, Jardine tends to dominate the band’s choruses, with Eckes either singing harmony or dialed down a tad in the mix. It works for them, but it would be nice to hear Eckes carry a hook now and then; he’s clearly capable, as he shows in his one real chance to do so, on “Exits And Entrances”.

With a concise ten tracks that sneak in at just a hair over half an hour, Best Intentions is the rare modern LP that feels a little too short; if closing track “Better Luck Next Time” leaves things feeling a bit unfinished—well, that makes for an awful good excuse to hit replay. In this battle of boy vs. girl and heart vs. head, we all win.

★★★★☆

*This review was composed by Jesse Richman