One thing I’ve come to respect about Bayside is they’ve always known who they are. They’ve never felt the need to reinvent themselves, and they’ve spent the last 16 years working to perfect a sound that’s entirely their own.

The band’s latest effort, Vacancy, is no exception. It is a growling collection of songs that feels familiar on first listen, a true continuation in Bayside’s story and sound.

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Bayside has a wealth of early material to boast about, but the band has continued to improve and impress as it has aged. The group’s most recent LP, Killing Time, proved to be one of its strongest records, as Bayside executed with excruciatingly enjoyable precision the formula we’ve grown to love it by. While fans wait patiently for another full batch of Bayside tunes, the New York natives offer up the Covers, Vol. I EP, a collection of five cover songs designed to hold fans over until new music arrives.

The one thing that Bayside does very well on this covers EP – and the EP’s strongest characteristic, in fact – is that the band does a helluva job making these songs sound like Bayside songs. Anthony Raneri’s nasally vocals and Jack O’Shea’s persistent shredding on the guitar are accounted for and produced brilliantly – just because these aren’t original tunes doesn’t mean Bayside took the easy road on this release.

There’s something that a lot of bands in today’s music scene don’t have. It’s a combination of things, really. It’s the consistency to be great, even good, over a considerable length of time, coupled with the guts and killer instinct to try out new things, to stretch boundaries and challenge themselves as musicians.

Bayside is a band that has that combination. With the release of its fifth studio full-length since 2004, Bayside has once again proven the notion that bands can keep the same sound they’ve had for years while still growing and putting out refreshingly worthwhile records. Killing Time takes the sound that the band focused on with 2008’s Shudder and mixes in glimpses of great Bayside records of years past. There are certain audible glimpses throughout the course of the 10-track record where fans familiar with Bayside’s earlier work will pick out parts where Bayside sounds like its old self, and parts where fans will notice that the band is trying something they’ve never done before.

The fine balance between utter disdain and hopelessness with relentless apathy is essentially what makes Long Island’s Bayside such an unclassifiable rock band. Their combination of depressing emo-centric lyricism and moody exteriors have made them one of the most easy-to-relate-to bands on the Victory roster (after all, how many of us can truly relate to the “bludgeoning” riffs and double-bass drum kicks of metalcore’s elite, hmm?). Take the dark melodic contours of Alkaline Trio, throw in the hazy optimism of Smoking Popes and add a dash of sincere melancholy (with some wicked wit for good measure), and you’ve got your basic Bayside sound.

“I can’t, can’t wait/till you see, see, see/what death and disgust/have done to me.”

The above lyric, which appears on Bayside’s third full length album, The Walking Wounded, can sum up the majority of thoughts and emotions the band are portraying to the listener. For those of you living under a rock, Bayside’s drummer, John “Beatz” Holohan was tragically killed in a van accident Halloween 2005. With such a traumatic experience looking the band in the face, it would have been easy to quit and go numb to the world. Instead, they kept Beatz in spirit, and became a better band. The hard work pays off onWounded, as the Long Island quartet (vocalist/guitarist Anthony Raneri, guitarist Jack O’Shea, bassist Nick Ghanbarian, and new drummer Chris Guglielmo) has never sounded more intense and on point. Working with them again are Shep Goodman and Kenny Gioia, both of whom produced 2005’s self-titled effort, and they helped made the band’s sound tighter and angrier.