Earn This

Rating: 3 and a half stars (out of 5)

Neon Trees opened for The Killers in 2008, inviting a natural comparison to a band they clearly respect.  A couple years later, the Trees are playing a gig at the upcoming Lollapalooza concerts, their lead single “Animal” gets some radio play, and…they’re also plugging Las Vegas vacations.  OK, so they haven’t become Killers-level huge yet, but there’s enough on Habits, their debut LP, to suggest they can.  

Whooshing through in a breezy 29 minutes, Habits is a fairly by-the-books dance-pop-rock album, with lots of nods to imperfect relationships and some endearingly catchy hooks.  Yet the Trees manage to sound both mainstream and independent—like they’re doing their own thing, and it just happens to sound like this.  “Animal” is suitably indie-quirky, with dance-friendly synths and a come-and-get-me refrain—“Oh, oh, I want some more / What are you waiting for? / Take a bite of my heart tonight”—but it tends to grate a little under heavy repetition.  Fortunately, quality-wise, it’s really only in the middle of the pack here. 

The real stand-out is the follow-up, “Your Surrender,” where U2 meets Rooney, with a hint of the Arcade Fire thrown in underneath. (If this sounds as appealing to you as it does me, buy this album; otherwise, don’t.) It works primarily because the refrain eschews that annoying sense of worthlessness found in too many of these songs, adopting instead the same kind of mischievousness as “Animal,” but with more confidence—“How long till your surrender?”

What truly sets Habits apart from its contemporaries in the somewhat-amateurish danceable post-punk scene, what makes it sound less pre-packaged than you’d expect, are the surprising shades of gray lurking underneath the songs.  Neon Trees manage to infuse these songs with more than a few traces of muffled darkness, as though coming from just under a pillow, a technique that works effectively against their natural pop leanings.  Songs like “Sins of My Youth,” “Girls and Boys in School,” and “Our War” bring forth cloudier arrangements than one might expect, which helps them sustain repeated plays.  Of most interest is closer “War,” a touching near-ballad both uplifting (particularly in the vocals) and tantalizing, as one can envision it having been further developed at the hands of a more refined band.

Other worthy tracks include “1983” (sometimes, they don’t hide their influences all that much), with legitimately striking twists and turns; but, the thing is, with an eight-song album, you’d better have a very high batting average.  Allmusic calls “Love and Affection” pure Bloc Party, but all it sounds like to me is a forced melody and those aforementioned irritating attitudes—the “I just don’t understand why my love isn’t good enough” kind. 

That’s the only truly skippable song here, but a fair number of tracks combine traits with faults (formulaic ‘soaring’ choruses, uninspired lyrics, similar sounds); they’d do well to freeze-frame the “Fuck all the rest and forget the rules!” coda of “Girls,” their strongest boundary-pushing moment here.  In the meantime, though, if you have an itch for this kind of music—and especially with Rooney’s Eureka looking like a disappointment—feel free to enjoy Neon Trees for what they are, rather than asking them to be something else.

Americans today don’t give a hoot about progressive rock.  Our parents grew up on Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd; the lucky ones collected vinyl from Kansas, ELP, and King Crimson.  Those heirlooms have clearly not trickled down yet here the way they have in experimental music havens scattered around Japan and Northern and Western Europe.

That makes it hard for Spock’s Beard, the international superstars from L.A. now in their eighteenth year, left standing as the proverbial prophets not accepted in their homeland.  Things seemed even bleaker in 2002 when frontman and brainfather Neal Morse departed from the group after six albums.  But now, with the release of X, the stalwart boys look to reclaim their crown as kings of the formerly-and-elsewhere-beloved genre.

Naturally, as their tenth album, X references their fifth: V.  Having run out their record deal last year, the band opted not to re-sign with any label just yet.  Instead, they funded and produced the album themselves and with the help of established friends in the industry.  Most of the money for the endeavor came from hopelessly devoted faithfuls like me who willingly shelled out up to $200 for various pre-ordering options offered before any recording took place.  Now that the finished piece of work is in our hands – 10 months later – was it worth it?

Ha.  “Worth it” would be an understatement.  This is the first post-Neal album that merits favorable comparisons to the band’s earlier work.  And that is the highest praise available.

Understand that this brand of prog comes with intricate time signatures, some eccentric keyboards, and long songs.  (The 8 tracks on X add up to over 78 minutes, near the capacity of an audio CD.)  Neal Morse was primarily a singing keyboardist, so, upon his departure, resident Moog master Ryo Okumoto attempted to maintain the key-centric attitude of the band to mixed results.  Drummer-cum-replacement-lead-singer Nick D’Virgilio then spent an album pretending he was a rock star before the guys managed to find their feet post-reconstruction.  This new album shows them gelling like never before and finding excellence as a fundamentally bass-driven band.

Two featured 16-minute tracks on the record are subdivided into movements.  Both “From the Darkness” and “Jaws of Heaven” are odd in that they forego the sort of blazing introductions or overtures that the band has historically employed to signal an incoming epic.  They hop right into things, the former beginning with a hard rock feel and the latter as a mournful western ballad.  At four movements apiece, though, the songs have plenty of time to pass through various moods and genres.

“From the Darkness” suffers slightly from a cut-and-jump approach to transitions that, while not disorienting in execution, leaves one feeling that they have just listened to four disconnected songs.  The abstract and vague lyrics (arguably a problem on half of X‘s tracks) don’t imbue any greater sense of unity in the story D’Virgilio spins.  Vastly superior in this regard is “Jaws of Heaven,” whose segues are fluid and whose movements feel related by recurring motives while each exhibits a unique musical character.  The third movement is particularly compelling: stirring far-off drums complement sparse guitar strokes and a soft voice, all held together by the persistent and understated bass.

Both suites conclude in powerful fashion.  Either would have been perfectly suited to end the album, an honor granted to “Jaws of Heaven.”

Four-stringer Dave Meros contributes his writing talents to “Edge of the In-Between,” a modest tune at 10 minutes long.  While not demarcated into sections, the song moves through a progression of passages with entrancing continuity.  The listener is never jilted by the undercurrents moving from a rollicking 4/4 chorus to an expansive 7/4 jam to a slowed-down bridge that alternates between dainty piano and sludgy bass.  The recapitulation that follows is reminiscent of the grand effect captured in “At the End of the Day” on V, a compliment not to be taken lightly.

Meros on bass and D’Virgilio on drums click so well that it’s easy to get the impression they are featured in every song on the album.  Soaring keys and crunching guitars are thus enabled to reach their full potential on every lick.

A strong case can be made that the standout track is “The Emperor’s Clothes,” nearly the shortest at under 6 minutes, beating out only the shifting and dramatic instrumental romp “Kamikaze.”  Written by guitarist Alan Morse (with added touches by his brother Neal!), it is a perfect example of great lyrics perfectly matched by effective musical arrangement.  The song tells the first half of the well-known story from the point of view of the tailor who has never sewn but has a plan to cash in: “Well you’ve never seen clothes / Like you won’t see those… ‘Cause the fabric’s so fine / It’s like it’s not even there.”

Bursting and driving trombones ring in the song and are later joined by french horns, a string quartet, and a number of wonky synthesized sounds to complement the core rock instrumentation.  Besides all this, there is a cheery a cappella section in the middle ended by a frenetic xylophone run.  Tempo jumps add to the effect of a song that is thoroughly fun.  Even the basic beat seems to recreate a circus parade!

Finally, a nod must be given to “Their Names Escape Me.”  The perfectly eerie mood created, so befitting of a song whose lyrics tell of a judgment and inquisition (“Tell us the names of every traitor who / Took up arms against the nation…”), continues and grows in tension as the band first sings the song proper, then moves into a list of names.  D’Virgilio captures in the tune my name and the names of every other contributor to the recording fund, all the while keeping legitimate music going underneath.  As the names are sung, the key raises steadily and the arrangement thickens until the eventual unearthly fade-out.

Led by Meros and D’Virgilio, with all intellectualism and virtuosity intact, X is a highly melodic and engaging product.  Finally, Spock’s Beard has recreated epics better than past efforts penned by Neal such as “Flow” and “The Good Don’t Last.”  Attempts to do so have been made on every record since his departure; only here have they paid off.  It is thrilling, after eighteen years, to see the boys raise the question of whether their greatest work lies behind them or ahead.

(I wrote a review of Forget and Not Slow Down about a week ago. Since then, I’ve been doing some research on the album’s origins, and I believe the results make it much more moving and devastating.)

I generally like to keep my nose out of other people’s business, but because  Forget and Not Slow Down is such an emotional album, I figured it could be valuable to try and figure out what events caused these emotions to better relate to its often abstruse lyrics. My poking around was not in vain. Here’s the story, as I understand it, but feel free to disagree with my speculation and assessment. I’ve linked to all the sources I used in reaching my conclusions.

Back story:

Matt Thiessen is generally known as one of the nicest dudes in music. He takes his Christianity seriously. Everyone was thrilled when he proposed in a most adorable way to radio host Shannon Murphy. She used her blog to keep her friends, and the world, updated on their engagement. But a few months later, she revealed that the two had split after she discovered “a few things about Matt that I just simply could not handle,” though she noted that she still believes he has an “amazingly huge heart.”

The break-up went down pretty quietly until Murphy got a new gig and started talking about an ex-boyfriend who cheated on her. Though she declined to use a name and vocation to identify who she was referring to, people made the connection.

Towards the end of the next year, Relient K’s sixth studio album came out. Thiessen says he wrote it when we went to a cabin in the woods for a couple of months to do nothing but reflect and pray and write. Forget and not Slow Down was the result, and it came out to pretty strong critical acclaim, with few media sources rating it worse than 4 out of 5 or the equivalent.

On the morning of the release on Shannon’s radio show, she directly implicated [ignore the two buffoon co-hosts and the morons on the phone, just listen to her] him as a cheater, although she noticeably avoids saying anything else negative about him. She also reveals some tidbits that add some serious poignancy to the album: the couple always used to travel to Savannah, GA — and there’s a song on the album called “Savannah.” Perhaps most devastatingly of all, “Baby,” a 40-second outro to Savannah, was the song Thiessen originally wrote for Murphy to play to her at their wedding.

Over the next few weeks in interviews, Thiessen frequently expanded on the album’s meaning, though he declined to delve into specific details regarding his personal situation. Of course, some fangirls refuse to believe Murphy is telling the truth because Matt is, like, so amazing. Others have taken a more reasonable view that neither of them are saints, and it’s pretty clear Matt likely betrayed her trust in some way, and they were not a perfect match anyways.

I suppose it’s theoretically possible that she’s completely BS’ing and slandering Thiessen, but he’s never really disputed her claims of adultery, and a few passages in the album more or less confirm her claims. So how does this information affect the listener?

Re-interpretation

More than anything else, these details of Thiessen and Murphy’s break-up make Forget and Not Slow Down a personal and powerful album. My initial reading of the album was as a broad, over-arching look at the concept of saying goodbye and pressing on. But, after hearing Murphy talk about the album, I think there’s a lot of value in the album as a reflection on their specific relationship.

If Thiessen in fact perfidiously caused the end of his relationship, then the words of the album carry much more weight — particularly considering his saintly public image before the scandal broke out. I think there’s something poignant and almost ironic about the leader of the most spiritual and positive of bands committing an act of great betrayal, then having to dealing with the consequences. It gives the album very high emotional stakes and some genuine heft.

Other great RK albums have been reflective and regretful, but on smaller levels. Forget and Not Slow Down is paradigm-smashing for the band in its gravity. This was evident to a certain extent when the album was interpreted broadly, its songs abstractions. But, with this new backstory, it’s clear that never before has Relient K been so acute, specific, and painful. The album works much stronger as a look at Thiessen’s shame and regret and recovery than as a detached conetmplation.

A few of the most telling passages:

A lion on his side was it the lying or his pride which brought him down?
Once the king of beasts but now they feast on the thoughts beneath his vacant crown
Trying to decide was it the lying or the pride which brought it down?
To be alone to be dethroned, believe me I know all about it now
from “Sahara”

This passage works as a general image of pride and sin, but works especially well considering the scandal and isolation surrounding Thiessen’s life. As the king of Christian rock (in terms of both quality and mainstream success), and one album removed from his biggest and happiest album, he sank to his lowest, and he’s still not sure if it was “lying or his pride which brought him down.”

Baby
It’s all that I can do to
Thank you
Cause every time you wrapped those arms around me
I felt I was home cause
Everything made sense when you were with me
from “Baby (Outro)”

Tossed off as an outro, I dismissed “Baby” as generic post-breakup pining until I learned the song’s origin as the song Thiessen wrote for Murphy to play at their wedding. What a harrowing inversion of the song’s initial concept: a bittersweet farewell at the abrupt conclusion of their relationship instead of at the beginning of their marriage. Thiessen has said in interviews that recording this album was overall a positive experience, but I can’t imagine that was true for “Baby.”

I’d rather forget and not slow down
Than gather regret for the things I can’t change now
If I become what I can’t accept
Resurrect the saint from within the wretch
Pour over me and wash my hands
Pour over me and wash my hands
from “Forget and Not Slow Down”

“Resurrect the saint from within the wretch” is the key line of the album, I think. It best sums up the album’s tone: regretful and defeated, but still looking for the right way to respond.

I met the devil and I stared her in the eyes
Her hair had scales like silver serpents
I, a statue, stood there mesmerized
I took the fire escape and made it out alive

Yeah I still burn from time to time
But I’ve a healing hand against my side

Blisters on my feet I crawled back home
Frozen from the sleet burned sand and stones
Nourished back to life by life alone
With one shake of the mane regain the throne
from “(If You Want It)”

These are the closing lyrics of the album, and they’re most beautiful Thiessen’s ever written, in my opinion. That first stanza is about as poetic and archetypal as any admission of guilt, and he follows it up not only with a re-affirmation of faith and healing (second stanza) but that dazzling coda. Those last four lines call back the lion image from “Sahara.” They also present an idea unusual in the modern rock-and-roll landscape, which tends towards angst and self-deprication: That the very act of living, even in misery, is valuable.

That’s how Forget and Not Slow Down is still a distinctly Relient K album, even as it confronts a major transgression by the band’s leader: It stays rooted in optimism and an a love for life more unquenchable than ever.

Revised rating: 4 and half stars (out of 5)

Note: This week, I’m reviewing the discography to date of Relient K, one album per day. At the end of the week I’ll make a “retrospective” post linking to all of the reviews. This is the band’s sixth album.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

A lot happened to Relient K between Five Score and its follow-up, Forget and Not Slow Down. Along with some personnel changes, their contract with both Gotee Records and Columbia expired.  But Gotee offered the band creative control of one of its defunct imprints, Mono Vs Stereo. This provided Thiessen and Relient K total freedom in the construction of their next album. The band also signed a deal with Jive to get the record out to a larger public.

So Thiessen went to work, free to explore the depths of his creativity, isolating himself in a cabin  in the woods following a rough breakup to write his next batch of the songs. He later said the experience allowed him to focus on producing thoughtful songs; he’d sometimes spend nine or ten hours following a single train of thought to its conclusion. Accordingly, Forget is a cerebral and ambitious album.

The theme of Forget is moving on — which has caused some writers to oversimplify it as a “break-up album” — and Thiessen’s large emotional vocabulary meshes well with the complicated, mixed-up feelings of saying goodbye. The album strikes a variety of tones — melancholy, desperate, wistful — both musically and lyrically, often at the same time.

The album takes on an unconventional structure, too. The track list shows 15 songs on the album, but it’s really more like nine or ten mini-suites, with a bunch of intros, outros, and thematically paired songs. Most of the band’s albums have had little deliberate flow, but Forget is an example of the whole surpassing the sum of the parts. I hate the term ‘concept album,’ but I think Forget‘s blending tunes and interwoven images earn it.

Thiessen’s words are more imaginative and mature than ever, albeit more obscure. The songs here do a good job transmitting the overpowering difficulty of a split that anyone who has ever parted ways with a serious love will recognize.

The title track is the catchiest and best moment of the album, even if it doesn’t quite fit in with everything else here. The propulsive singalong sounds like it belongs on Mmhmm or Five Score though the lyrics effectively set the tone (of optimism battling emotional adversity) for the rest of the album. It’s one of the band’s better singles ever, only a hair behind “Be My Escape” and “Who I Am Hates Who I’ve Been.”

Among other distinguished moments on the album are the mini-epic “Savannah” and the gut-wrenching, two-part finale of “This is the End” and “(If You Want It).” None of the songs are bad, however, and it’s more difficult to choose highlights on this album than any previous RK album because of how connected each track is to the one before and after it.

Even more than Five Score before it, Forget lacks the immediacy and pop hooks of Relient K’s early moments. But the brilliant and more subtle songwriting grows on you the more you listen to it. There’s enough happening here, sonically and emotionally, to warrant repeated visits. With each listen, I’m tempted to bump my rating up a half star, so I wouldn’t be surprised if I put this album in rarefied 4.5 or 5 star range at some point down the line.

Note: This week, I’m reviewing the discography to date of Relient K, one album per day. At the end of the week I’ll make a “retrospective” post linking to all of the reviews. This is the band’s diversion between their fifth and sixth albums.

Rating: 3 and a half stars (out of 5)

Relient K has consistently released one limited-print EP alongside — usually a few months before or after — each album. But they’ve never done anything quite like The Bird and the Bee Sides, a 26-track double-EP that serves both as a 13-track set of new content and a collection of remastered rarities and B-sides. It’s really one of the great fan services I’ve ever witnessed from a band.

The first thirteen tracks of the disc are all new songs and are subtitled the “The Nashville Tennis EP.”  As the (quite clever) name suggests, it has a little bit of a southern, rootsy undercurrent to it. An acoustic and country instrumentation gets some rotation with the usual guitars, bass, and drums. But aside from this — and the resulting sonic texture that’s very amber and warm — the thirteen songs here have little in common.

It’s clear that most of them are leftovers from the Five Score sessions: Most of the tracks are good ideas that didn’t quite develop or tracks that are novelty or somehow on the fringe. A few of the tracks were written by members of the band other than Thiessen (“No Reaction,” “The Last, The Lost, and the Least,” and “You’ll Always Be My Best Friend,” a cute ballad co-written by Thiessen and bassist Matt Hoopes). A few are underdeveloped (“Beaming”) or ideas that have been tossed around for awhile (“There Was No Thief,” a reinvention of “The Thief” from “The Apathetic EP” that followedMmhmm). And a few are just not as compelling as the songs on Five Score (“The Lining is Silver”).

My favorite tracks from the “Tennis EP” are “At Least We Made it This Far” a melancholy love song that bemoans the difficulty of long-distance romance, and “Where Do I Go From Here,” which could easily pass as a solid Mmhmm track if not for the banjo intro.

I also want to call out “Bee Your Man,” a novelty/comedy track that rounds out the first half of the disc. I love it not for jokes, but because of how good it actually sounds. It’s a bluegrass/country spoof that, for the twenty or so seconds it’s a straight-face performance, is really good. Relient K could really make a great country-pop album. Some of the best moments of recent albums (“Faking My Own Suicide,” “At Least We Made it This Far”) have been folk and country-tinged.

The second half of the disc is subtitled “The Bird and the Bee Sides” — yep, the same name as the full package — and it’s a bunch of demos, old EP tracks, and acoustic renditions of album songs. Every song, except for a couple of the acoustic cuts and maybe a demo or two, predates Mmhmm, so there’s lots of vintage RK silliness packed into these tracks. Most of them are not worth more than a single listen, but I appreciated having access to them nonetheless. Fans more obsessive or nostalgic than I, particularly those disappointed with the band’s recent releases, might find this set extremely valuable, but little here matches the band’s best moments even if these throwaways are good slices of catchy fun.

The one song here that I unconditionally recommend is the reinvented “Jefferson Aeroplane,” which was tucked away as the last track on Two Lefts. There, it was a solid but understated way to close a really strong album. Here, it’s fleshed out with acoustic guitar, a more interesting percussion part, a re-write of the meandering ending, and beautiful vocals. This alternate version of “Jefferson Aeroplane” ranks as one of the best ever tracks by the band.

What I really love, though, is that Relient K would put in the effort to not only collect these dusty records — the type that fans unfairly obsess over simply because they’re hard to find — but that they’d put in the effort to get it remastered and sounding just right. Particularly welcome are the four songs on The Vinyl Countdown EP, an older disc (aptly) only available on vinyl. The Bird and the Bee Sides, while not as essential as the band’s real studio albums, is not an empty cash in.

Some of the remastering adds an excessive layer of texture to the really early, simplistic B-sides (“For the Band,” I’m looking at you). But it’s great to see a band putting forth a fan-first project like this.

Note: This week, I’m reviewing the discography to date of Relient K, one album per day. At the end of the week I’ll make a “retrospective” post linking to all of the reviews. This is the band’s fifth album.

Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)

Sorry, Relient K. Five Score and Seven Years Ago is just an awful title for an album, which is itself quite good and another creative leap forward for the band.

Besides the title, the first thing you’re likely to notice about Five Score is how diverse its sound is. Mmhmm was marked with a very consistent sound except for a few flourishes; banjos and harmonicas occasionally peeked through the glossy coat of guitar and drums. Five Score draws from a wider variety of sounds (*). There’s some synthesized parts, more keyboard than ever, flirtations with folk influences, extensive use of brass, and more. There’s even an a capellasong.

(*) According to the album liner notes, the album features these instruments: guitar, drums, bass, piano, banjo, organ, trumpet, french horn, trombone, baritone horn, bells, toy piano, and penny whistle.

The second thing you’ll notice about Five Score is how ambitious it is. Dense and disorienting, these fourteen tracks cover a wide variety of themes and structures. From a conspiracy theory about the death of Abraham Lincoln that opens the album(perhaps to justify the bogus title, which I promise I’ll stop harping on now) to the eleven-minute epic about life and death and Jesus that closes it, there’s a lot happening in Five Score.

One gem is “Forgiven,” which mourns original sin then breaks free from it with a soaring chorus and punchy piano. It’s one of many songs that deals with ideas that are challenging both intellectually and spiritually. But the lyrical cleverness and sing-a-long choruses keep the music accessible. It’s nice to see an album tackle profound themes cogently, but not make the mistake of thinking weighty themes require convoluted tunes.

At the same time, the album still has moments of levity. It seems Thiessen listened to a few of the critics and fans who complained that Mmhmm, while a great record, was missing some of the joy of previous albums. Scattered in are a few of the happiest numbers ever recorded by the band. The standout is “Must Have Done Something Right,” the most straightforward boy-girl love song Thiessen has written. It almost sounds like a throwback to Two Lefts.

The album closes with “Deathbed,” an opus of a song. It feels a little bit like a concerto or a rhapsody in that it’s broken down into distinct segments but has a recurring musical theme. It weaves a tale of descent, guilt, suffering, and — ultimately — redemption. For a band whose focus is so pop-oriented with little classical or progressive work, the band builds the song to quite a moving climax. It also shows their undying Christian streak and built-in hopefulness.

But even including “Deathbed” and “Must Have Done Something Right,” the best track on the album is “Faking My Own Suicide.” It’s not only one of the darkest songs Thiessen has ever written, but one of the warmest. The band’s official line on the song is that it’s a re-telling of the old black comedy Harold and Maude, purportedly Thiessen’s favorite film. Keen listeners will notice, though, that the tale parallels the death and resurrection of Jesus. The closing line is a classic: “Our love is so alive.”

Of course, there’s another side to the complexity. The music, while still accessible and pop-like in structure, has lost a bit of its immediacy and urgency. The intricate sound has come at the cost of a bit of Relient K’s usual energy. Simply, with the exception of “Must Have Done Something Right,” the songs here just aren’t as catchy as those on other albums, particularly Mmhmm and Two Lefts.

But Five Score is overall a major success and another key step forward in the Relient K’s development. It features a much wider array of sounds and styles that would expand even further in its next studio album.

Note: This week, I’m reviewing the discography to date of Relient K, one album per day. At the end of the week I’ll make a “retrospective” post linking to all of the reviews. This is the band’s fourth album.

Rating: 4 and a half stars (out of 5)

The success and quality of Two Lefts caught the eye of Columbia Records who signed the band to major deal. The ensuing album, Mmhmm, is lean and muscular. Capitol Records effectively focused the band towards heavy-hitting sound and serious lyrics.

Song for song, Mmhmm is Relient K’s strongest album to date. “Be My Escape” is a microcosm of everything great about Relient K: an emotional honesty, a prayerful edge, propulsive guitar, and tight melodies. If they ever compile a greatest hits album, “Be My Escape” should be the leadoff.

The close runner-up is “Who I Am Hates Who I’ve Been,” with some of the band’s best hooks and an opening lyric that deserves to join the pantheon of opening lines: “I watched the proverbial sunrise coming over the Pacific.” Six years later, “Be My Escape” and “Who I Am” are still the band’s two crowning jewels.

With a big budget studio polishing the band’s performances, the sound is more colorful and evocative than ever before. Even songs that seem designed as throwaways — “My Girl’s Ex-Boyfriend” or the wordy “The Only Thing Worse Than Beating a Dead Horse is Betting on It” — have a sparkle that makes them worth revisiting again and again.

Along with the new sound comes a slightly different attitude: These tracks are darker and sharper than the playful sprawl on previous discs. I wonder how much of this was Thiessen’s vision as opposed to Columbia pushing him to target the “emo” crowd. Regardless, the approach works for the most part. Thiessen is adept enough at writing to convincingly play the love-battered ex-boyfriend.

The spine of the album is the two-part suite, “Which to Bury, Us or the Hatchet?” and “Let it All Out” which show two different takes on a breakup: angst and ache, respectively. “Hatchet” sears with suffocating drums and pained background wails. “Let it All Out” simmers quietly with piano and wood block. The latter also throws in a brilliant harmonica part that works well enough in the song that I wish there was more of it.

For all the great music and writing, there is something detectable missing. A lot of the band’s appeal from their early days was a sense of humor and playful observation. I’m all for deepening and expanding their artistic scope, so I don’t entirely mind the shift, but the reflective tour de forces had to take the place of something. The wit is not entirely gone — probably five or six songs have smile-worthy wordplay — but it’s somewhat absent in the name of improved craft.

Ultimately, Mmhmm is an important step in the band’s development. Thiessen and co. showed hints of becoming more sophisticated musicians with Two Lefts, but they fully embrace their maturity on Mmhmm. The cover of Mmhmmshows a flower in bloom, and it’s around this time that Relient K the musicians began blossoming into Relient K the artists.

Note: This week, I’m reviewing the discography to date of Relient K, one album per day. At the end of the week I’ll make a “retrospective” post linking to all of the reviews. This is the band’s third album.

Rating: 5 stars (out of 5)

Two years and a forgettable EP later, Relient K released their third and best album to date. Two Lefts Don’t Make a Right… But Three Do — besides making the band 2 for 3 on awful album names — took all of the enjoyable elements of the first two releases, amplified them, weeded out most of the bad, and put it into a fun, messy, exciting product.

The sound, aside from feeling significantly more polished, is not drastically different from Anatomy: it’s still straightforward pop with a “punk” edge to it, along the lines of Blink 182 or Sum 41. But the band’s touch is much more deft this time. The riffs are less repetitive and grating, the performances are stronger, and the band just gels together a little bit better.

What really makes Two Lefts great, though, are the songs. Every song deals with some sort of coming-of-age theme, yet most of the tracks retain their fun. It’s a tough balancing act to pull: The music here is at once accessible, reflective, and substantial. And the writing has aged well; seven years later, Thiessen’s humility seems more relevant than ever.

My favorite trick of Thiessen’s is his knack for hiding some broad observations and repressed emotions behind little images and sly jokes. Take, for instance, “In Love With the ’80s,” the album’s fifth track. On the surface, it’s a bunch of cultural references. But, underneath that surface, the song is actually about the danger in excessive nostalgia (e.g. “Live without a care / what could possibly go wrong?”). It’s a small touch, but a key one, because it gives the song a place in the album’s thematic arc.

The band repeats follows this pattern of adding meaning to the silliness on numerous occasions on Two Lefts; “Mood Rings” is about illogical emotion (courtesy of females), “Gibberish” is an extended “shut up” gag that makes a commentary on the importance of healthy communication, etc.

Among the album’s standout songs are “Chap Stick, Chapped Lips, and Things Like Chemistry,” the opening track, which is three minutes of perfection. Thiessen riffs on theme parks and cell phones and relationships and back again, all with stellar guitars, drums, and “na na na” harmonies.

“Forward Motion,” which slows down after a passable intro guitar solo, also excels. Aside from the clever lyrics (“Experience the bittersweet / to taste defeat then brush my teeth / ’cause I struggle with forward motion”), the song rocks harder than anything on the band’s first two albums, yet ends on a gentle piano riff.

Those two, “In Love With the ’80s,” and ballad “Getting Into You” — which is just as good as Anatomy’s “For the Moments I Feel Faint” without going straight for the Jesus jugular — are probably the strongest here. But there’s hardly a weak track in these 14. The whole album coheres into a lament of the pitfalls of suburbia — or, more generally, complacency and shallowness. Even the joke track at the end of the album is strong, the funniest the band’s ever done.

What’s most refreshing about Two Lefts is that we get our first real peek at Thiessen being a true sage, a bona fide lyrical maestro. His lyrics are incredibly shrewd in spite of the silliness. There’s a humility and spirituality coming from his roots as a Christian worship leader that lends his music  poignancy(*). Three albums in, his writing was pretty strong, and it would only grow better with time.

(*) The genuine writing in the songs is a stark contrast to the sort of writing that usually accompanies “pop-punk” music, a genre known for shallowness and phoniness.

The band would soon grow more sophisticated and polished, but Two Lefts remains Relient K’s masterpiece. It retains their early exuberance but packs an emotional punch as strong as their more recent work. The transition between quirky, small-time band to major-label artist is captured here, and it has the best of both worlds.

Note: This week, I’m reviewing the discography to date of Relient K, one album per day. At the end of the week I’ll make a “retrospective” post linking to all of the reviews. This is the band’s second album.

Rating: 3 stars (out of 5)

Taking the strengths of the debut — some catchy hooks and a cleverness in blending outright Christianity with secular themes – The Anatomy of the Tongue in Cheek is a big step forward for Relient K in every department. It’s not quite a good album, but it certainly set a trajectory for Relient K to reach that plane.

First, the performances by the band are leaps ahead. From the rhythm to the guitar to the vocal harmonies, Anatomysounds like the work of professionals as opposed to the debut that sounded like four kids in a basement. The band sounds like it really cares about the music: subtleties (particularly in the drumwork) absent from the debut give songs here momentum and shape.

The songwriting is also considerably more intelligent. “Sadie Hawkins Dance” manages to be cheeky and nerdy while still completely endearing, at least if you can excuse the few dud rhymes (“She said ‘you’re cool and smooth with talking / Will you go with me to the Sadie Hawkins?’” — ouch). The best track of the album is “For the Moments I Feel Faint,” an impassioned ballad in defense of Jesus. Complete with strings and a falsetto coda, it could easily pass for something you’d hear on the radio if it wasn’t for the J-bomb in the chorus.

The band also experiment with a few themes and ideas here that are interesting if not entirely successful. “Failure to Excommunicate” proclaims a love for “the outcast,” which, if the opening verse is to be trusted, means illegal immigrants. “What Have You Been Doing Lately?” reveals that condescension is not a pretty color for Relient K.

For all the improvement, there’s lots of filler mixed in. “May the Horse Be With You” is one weak pun after another without much music tying together. “Lion-O” is an empty cultural reference that’s at least remedied with some interesting hooks. With eighteen tracks, there’s enough material to find spots where the band almost gets it right — the syncopated bridge in “Breakdown,” for example — then bloats it or mixes it in with mediocrity.

Thiessen whips out the piano and even the horns in “Less is More,” to very good effect. It’s one of the few tracks — along with “Sadie Hawkins,” “For the Moments,” the peppy “Pressing On,” and a couple others — that’s worth repeated listening on their sophomore album.

Note: This week, I’m reviewing the discography to date of Relient K, one album per day. At the end of the week I’ll make a “retrospective” post linking to all of the reviews. This is the band’s first album.

Rating: 2 stars (out of 5)

One of the best arguments in favor of nurture over nature, Relient K transformed themselves from completely insignificant to one of pop’s most underrated bands not through luck or by accident, but hard work and steady improvement. Each album’s craft is better than the last, and the sophistication of the songwriting has been on a steady incline.

The band’s consistent effort has paid great dividends, but has not been without sacrifice. The slapdash silliness that defined the band’s early work almost completely disappeared by their fourth album, for better and worse. As they tread further down the road of experimentation, Relient K’s pop hooks have lost a bit of their immediacy.

Hailing from Canton, Ohio, the band formed in 1998 when Matt Thiessen and two of his buddies who wanted to start a worship band began writing simple pop songs. After a demo album and an EP, Relient K’s self-titled debut was released in 2000.

Generic and simplistic, Relient K is undoubtedly the weakest studio album the band has released. From the excessive use of cultural references — as if merely mentioning Marilyn Manson or Back to the Future is itself funny — to the bland instrumental performances and vocal harmonies, their debut had little to indicate the band could some day develop into something special.

Only a few tracks are noteworthy. “Softer to Me,” though its lyrics are a rather toothless lament of the challenge of just being alive, is more ambitious musically than anything else on the album, with a pleasant little guitar groove. “K Car” attempts to give reasoning for naming the band (*) after a shoddy compact Plymouth (the explanation, a very Christian one and foreshadowing the band’s tendency for self-deprecation, is that “we’ve got a K-car on the road of life,” but “we’re gonna get far if the driver’s Christ”).

(*) Though the song gives justifies the name, it doesn’t address the misspelling. The car is spelled “Reliant K.”  Whether the band has confirmed this or not, I’m not sure, but I’ve read on multiple websites that Thiessen and co. were concerned about copyright, which I don’t think would have been an issue even if they’d used Chrysler’s spelling. Oh well; it’s not like the band’s key demographic is likely to know what a Reliant car is anyways.

Overall, though, the cheese far outweighs the substance. Listeners are suggested to avoid this disc unless they want looking for insight into the band’s development.