Artist: Born AnchorsAlbum: Colorize the GreyLabel: Steer Clear RecordsRelease Date: July 27Rating (Skip, Stream, or Buy): SkipDownload: “Matter of Taste”The opening track on Colorize the Grey, Born Anchors’ sophomore album, puts the nine songs following it in perspective. “Matter of Taste” states the record’s fundamental problem in the chorus: “A matter of taste/a matter of choosing sides.” These lines are repeated over and over again, driving home the point that Colorize the Grey is a very different album from Sprezzatura, Born Anchors’ stellar debut. Where Sprezzatura was a raw, guitar-driven experiment in power pop, Colorize the Grey is polished and tightly produced. Any distortion or fuzz has been removed from these new songs, replaced with clear vocals and perfectly tuned guitars.As the band itself points out, preferring rough garage-punk influenced music to sparkling pop melodies is absolutely a matter of taste. But Colorize the Grey isn’t just a genre shift for Born Anchors; it feels markedly less inspired or emotional than Sprezzatura. Maybe some fans of Sprezzatura will follow the band into new territory, but others could be disappointed that the musicians took a wrong turn somewhere, making an 180-degree shift into sterile songwriting. “Teasing Lions,” for example, starts out with a promising guitar riff but quickly loses its momentum and becomes a simple versus-chorus-verse pop song. When Jason Parker sings, “When you tease the lions/ bodies fall/ when you tease the lions/ you’ll feel the claws,” there’s no weight behind the words and no driving, angry instrumentals to back it up. There are two truly lovely songs on the album: “The Taming,” a slower, more ballad-influenced track, and “Whisper,” a smart pop-punk song. But both would be better suited as the stand-out gamechangers among eight other grungy power-pop songs. On Colorize the Grey, they just blend in with others, becoming too easy to forget.