The dangers of following up a successful album are well-documented.\u00a0 The immediate question is obvious: do you play it safe and record a near-clone of the album you just rode up the charts, or do you take some risks? <\/p>\n
Bands that adopt the former approach tend to make a lot of money for a little while, until their audience gets bored of hearing the same thing over and over.\u00a0 Bands that take the latter path tend to have staying power, not to mention a semblance of artistic credibility — if their audience keeps up with the changes. <\/p>\n
Switchfoot’s 2005 release Nothing Is Sound<\/em> was a solid success, its fat post-grunge guitars supporting searching, philosophically-minded lyrics on cuts like the minor hit \u201cStars.\u201d\u00a0 You can hear the difference from the first thrashy\/trashy notes of the opening title track, as the band sets aside its penchant for slightly slick, undeniably muscular anthems of the soul and latches onto a wide-open, crunchy garage-rock sound full of jagged riffs and furious drumming.\u00a0 The lyrics are serious-minded, but more abstract than anything on Switchfoot songwriter\/frontman Jon Foreman\u2019s anti-materialist streak comes to the fore on the similarly frenetic \u201cAmerican Dream,\u201d surely one of the most danceable political statements of the decade.\u00a0 \u201cI want to live and die for bigger things \/ I\u2019m tired of fighting for just me\u2026 Red, white, blue and green \/ But that ain\u2019t my \u201cDirty Second Hands\u201d is where you begin to sense how far the guys are reaching, a spooky, close-miked, echoey ode to isolation and dislocation full of harshly plucked notes and ominous vocals.\u00a0 Not that they\u2019ve abandoned the stadium-scaled philosophizing of Nothing Is Sound<\/i> completely — the soaring \u201cAwakening\u201d is one of the boys\u2019 very best U2 homages, a powerhouse, singalong spiritual anthem.\u00a0 But then they follow that familiar sound with \u201cCircles,\u201d a bravura cut that features guest vocals and mandolin from Sean and Sara Watkins of newgrass heroes Nickel Creek.\u00a0 First mixing quietly urgent verses with slamming, Zeppelinesque choruses, it builds to a thundering crescendo before dropping back to a beautifully arranged prog-folk coda that feels like a misplaced snippet of circa-1971 Yes.<\/p>\n Continuing to mix it up, the boys delve into raucous, Jet-like guitar rock (the loose, giddy \u201cAmateur Lovers\u201d), a dreamy, eerie story-song (\u201cFaust, Midas And Myself\u201d), and urgent, jittery, New Wave-influenced rock (\u201cBurn Out Bright\u201d).\u00a0 Lyrically, Foreman expands his field of vision as well, managing to turn out an actual love song (\u201cHead Over Heels\u201d), though he invests the latter with a contrary, unsettled edge that\u2019s both true-to-life and resonant (\u201cYou\u2019re everything that\u2019s fair in love and war\u201d).\u00a0 <\/p>\n Somewhere in the middle, Switchfoot cleanses your between-course palate with perhaps the biggest surprise, a sublime, mid-tempo, chiming-guitars elegy (\u201cYesterdays\u201d) that sounds like nothing so much as Bono fronting Out Of Time<\/i>-era R.E.M.\u00a0 Similarly subdued, closer \u201cLet Your Love Be Strong\u201d sums up everything that\u2019s appealing about Switchfoot in general and this album in particular — a steadily evolving arrangement, passionate vocals and a thoughtful lyric (\u201cMaybe I\u2019m just idealistic to assume that truth \/ Could be fact and form \/ That love could be a verb\u201d).<\/p>\n Mixing things up and taking real chances, Switchfoot shows courage and growth on Oh! Gravity<\/i>, eschewing the sure thing they might have settled for, and instead issuing a diverse disc that challenges their audience.\u00a0 Not quite a masterpiece, Oh! Gravity<\/i> is nonetheless a brave, impressive and thoroughly entertaining piece of work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":28653,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[7886],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-40139","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-switchfoot","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/40139\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28653"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=40139"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=40139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}