Band:
Jon Foreman
Tim Foreman
Chad Butler
Jerome Fontamillas
Drew Shirley
Discography:
1997: The Legend of Chin
1999: New Way to Be Human
2000: Learning to Breathe
2003: The Beautiful Letdown
2005: Nothing Is Sound
2006: Oh! Gravity.
2009: Hello Hurricane
Guests:
Info
Neal Avron - producer
Mike Elizondo – executive producer
Adam Hawkins – engineer, mixing
Released 28/9-2011
Reviewed 16/10-2011
Links:
switchfoot.com
myspace
youtube
atlantic
Switchfoot which is a surfing theme referring to something I believe you should be able to figure out for yourselves (if you don’t, you are stupid), say that they want to make music for the thinking individual and music that opens the mind of the listener. That is quite the big words as music for the thinking individual must be music that makes this thinker think and that is probably not always the easiest thing to do with music. They are also stating that they are inspired by bands like U2 or the Beatles and many more. The album has also been reviewed by quite a few I have found on the internet and though they are mostly positive there are still some who are not as positive to the band. The Christian reviewers seems to adore the album though, there is also quite the spread amongst reviewers about which songs are the best. Below you will learn what this reviewer thinks.
First of all I would like to move the negatives out of the way and start by saying that the band is awfully bad when they go down tempo to slow, ballad type song. I would much rather listen to the great sound of an electrical jigsaw cutting through a poorly secured metal girder, the singer just does not have the vocal quality to carry such style of song. He is quite unvaried and generally rather monotone. Also the album sounds quite tired, most of the songs does nothing to me, they are okay but they do not do anything or get anywhere and the title track is the worst on the album.
Well, that were the negatives in a short paragraph, how about positives? The positives are found when the bands move with more energy, the energetic songs like Dark Horses or the opening Afterlife are very good but also the track called Selling the News which has a spoken word verse and a very catchy chorus which makes a really good song that I see as a potential hit for the band. The production is impeccable with a modern clean sound that I think along with the three great tracks I mentioned are the real highlight of the album.
But you forgot to say how it sounds you say now, and you’d be wrong because I did not forget I left that out until now. They are described as an alternative rock band and their sound is quite remnant of other bands that are called that, there are some experimenting with spoken word parts and some other smaller adventures but for being for the thinker they are quite simplistic as their music hardly requires much thinking to get into it is rather straightforward. They build from one baseline which is sort of punkish rockmusik, and from there they make small musical adventures but really nothing that will challenge you as a listener. If you wonder what the lyrical causality theme does to the music of this album I would say that it does nothing as it is nothing you notice anyway. Commercially suitable it is in case you were wondering, most of the songs will blend in well in the regular radio noise. The album has twelve tracks and it plays for slightly over 50 minutes which is a little on the long side.
I think that this album has me switching foot a lot as it on one had is very good while on the other hand it is quite poor but as the lyrical theme it all balances out and in the end it stays in the middle, an okay rock album with some real lows and some great highs.
HHHHHHH
