{"id":42461,"date":"2011-11-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-11-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/vice-verses\/"},"modified":"2026-07-04T11:20:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-04T11:20:11","slug":"vice-verses","status":"publish","type":"review","link":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/reviews\/vice-verses\/","title":{"rendered":"Vice Verses"},"content":{"rendered":"

The duality of existence\u2014life and death, joy and sadness, darkness and light\u2014is the focus of Switchfoot\u2019s eighth studio album Vice Verses<\/i>. It’s a theme in the truest sense of the word, carried through every aspect of this release, from the songs themselves to the cover artwork to the track sequencing. This disc also continues the San Diego alt-rock quintet\u2019s album-to-album pattern of experimenting, then consolidating, then experimenting again. The Beautiful Letdown<\/i><\/a> (2003) represented a major expansion of their sound that was brought to fruition on Nothing Is Sound<\/i><\/a> (2005).\u00a0 Oh! Gravity<\/i><\/a> (2006) was all over the place musically, followed by the more focused Hello Hurricane<\/i><\/a>.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Vice Verses<\/i> tips the scales again in favor of exploration for Switchfoot\u2014Jonathan Foreman (vocals\/guitar), Tim Foreman (bass\/vocals), Chad Butler (drums), Jerome Fontamillas (keyboards\/guitar) and Drew Shirley (guitar).\u00a0 From stadium-ready anthems like thundering opener \u201cAfterlife\u201d and keening closer \u201cWhere I Belong,\u201d to the dark, distorted, almost rap-metal-flavored \u201cThe War Inside,\u201d to poppy, propulsive numbers like \u201cThe Original\u201d and \u201cRise Above It\u201d and quiet contemplations like \u201cRestless\u201d and \u201cSouvenirs,\u201d these guys can\u2019t or won\u2019t sit still. The biggest stretch of all finds Switchfoot testing their audience\u2019s boundaries with a full-on rap number, and while \u201cSelling The News\u201d is surely the biggest reach here, the experiment is a successful one, a rippling, sturdy monologue about the thoroughly corrupted 24-hour-news-cycle spin machine. <\/p>\n

Still, it\u2019s the inspirational power of tunes like the anthemic \u201cAfterlife\u201d and \u201cDark Horses,\u201d and the fearless introspection of quieter songs like \u201cThrive\u201d and \u201cSouvenirs\u201d that powers this album, even as the dichotomy they represent\u2014anthems and ballads, light and heavy, big and small\u2014illustrates the album\u2019s theme in bold letters. The title track represents another new wrinkle for the band, an acoustic ballad with just guitar and Foreman\u2019s voice for the most part, pouring out the purest distillation of the album\u2019s theme: \u201cYou got your babies, I got my hearses \/ Every blessing comes with a set of curses \/ I got my vices \/ I got my vice verses.\u201d\u00a0 <\/p>\n

So how do you navigate that duality in your day-to-day life? How do you cope with a world in which kindness and cruelty, happiness and sadness, good and evil exist side by side?\u00a0 For the guys in Switchfoot, their faith is key\u2014but it\u2019s not a cure-all, and Foreman doesn\u2019t present it as such. The truth is that we can never really answer those questions. We just do the best we can, relying on faith or hope or love or pure stubbornness (or some combination of these) to get through the day.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve commented before on how effectively Switchfoot explores spiritual and philosophical themes without assuming that their audience shares their own Christian perspective. I have to say that on my first listen to Vice Verses<\/i>, I was a little put off by some of the more overt references to afterlife and resurrection and God and such. I wouldn\u2019t necessarily recommend this album as an entry point to the band for anyone who\u2019s skittish about that sort of thing in their music. But if you give these songs a chance, you\u2019ll find that their tone is anything but preachy. It seems to me that what\u2019s happening is simply Jonathan Foreman using the vocabulary of his own life (and faith) to talk about universal concerns. He doesn\u2019t pretend to have all the answers; he only articulates the questions better than most.<\/p>\n

In just one example of the latter, two minutes into stately, soaring closer \u201cWhere I Belong,\u201d in the midst of addressing serious spiritual concerns, Foreman casually drops this beauty: \u201cBut I\u2019m not sentimental \/ This skin and bones is a rental \/ And no one makes it out alive.\u201d Truth from any perspective. <\/p>\n

Vice Verses<\/i> has its own dual nature, both sprawling and carefully shaped, raw in places and quite polished in others. In hewing as purposefully to a theme as it does, it sometimes feels like it loses some spontaneity. That said, while might not be the strongest album of Switchfoot’s career\u2014for that, look to Nothing Is Sound<\/i> and Hello Hurricane<\/i>\u2014a notch below their best is impressive altitude indeed. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":30787,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[7886],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-42461","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\/42461","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=42461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/42461\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=42461"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=42461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}