Oh, Switchfoot, you crazy bunch of philosophizing surfer dudes. You've done it again. And this time, you've done it faster than you did it on any other album. It was a two-and-a-half year wait for new material after your breakthrough album The Beautiful Letdown was released to highly respectable mainstream success, and it seemed that everyone still loved you right up until last year's follow-up, Nothing Is Sound. Then the copy protection issue hit. And the accusations that you guys were really just recycling the same subject matter over and over. Sure, you had the #1 spot on a lot of Christian rock fans' Top 10 lists already secured before you even released the album, but it seemed that the mainstream's fascination with you dwindled once you released that follow-up. Hey, it happens with almost any band with Christian overtones that makes waves in the mainstream (see Jars of Clay and P.O.D.). Fame is fleeting. But you guys didn't relent, and your hard work led you to crank out Oh! Gravity just in the nick of time for a 2006 release date. Job well done, dudes.

Except for one thing: that old subject matter issue. Oh! Gravity is a great series of little bursts of rocking energy married to melodies that are catchy, quirky, and sometimes quite reflective. You've got that skill down pat. What you guys don't seem to realize is that "This Is Your Life and you're Meant to Live it, so I Dare You to Move" is becoming a bit of a dead horse. You first told us that "life's more than girls" way back in 1997, and reiterated that in 2003 while also making sure that we knew it was more than money, which you'd really been saying ever since your humorous tale about getting the "Company Car" in 1999. And you proceeded to tell us a lot of the same stuff over again, in more Ecclesiastical tones, in 2005, and while I appreciated the thicker, darker, rock sound, I started wonder if the humor had been lost and whether there was anything else up your collective sleeves. As it turns out, there mostly isn't. And that's frustrating.

The good part is that if we have to hear a lot of these same "there's gotta be something more" types of themes again, I'll admit that it's a lot more fun to hear them with a five-piece band than it was with a three piece. The Beautiful Letdown may still be your career-defining album, but it was wise to leave behind the sometimes overproduced, synthesized pop influences and venture into meatier rock territory (you guys always could rock, but you didn't really get the momentum issues in your track listings worked out until Nothing Is Sound). Jerome Fontamillas and his keyboards have proven to be a good addition to the band's sound, but for my money, Drew Shirley's extra guitar has been an even better one. The first three tracks of your new album just explode out of the gate with fun-loving urgency, and most of the rest of the album, while a bit more strangely constructed, follows suit. Maybe you guys still test my patience once or twice when you finally do slow it down, but nothing here plods along like your least interesting songs have in the past - you've learned how to fill out the gentler moments with something more compelling and wistful. If more time had been spent diversifying the lyrics, we might be looking at Album of the Year material here, honestly. But still, it's a fun batch of songs, sung passionately (occasionally almost too much so!) by the sun-bleached, slightly cracked voice of Jon Foreman, and you've managed to get me hooked enough to rush out and get a physical copy come December 26. (And seriously, record label people, what's with releasing hotly anticipated albums on December 26? It's like you know we would have wanted to get records like this for people we love for Christmas, and you held out until the day after so that we'd have to buy them some other CD and then run out to grab this using the gift certificates we found in our stockings on Christmas morning. Punks.)

Oh! Gravity
In the back room of the Pentagon
There's a thin man with a line drawn
With a red jaw and a red bite
Watch the headline on the next night...
Well, this is fun! The band comes bursting out with a zippy little melody that plays out much like "New Way to Be Human" did, only faster and louder. (There might even be a little bit of whistling in the background, which is also highly reminiscent of "New Way"). It's the ideal blend of the poppy quirkiness that characterized their early work and the thicker, dual-guitar-attack sound that they developed after bringing Drew Shirley on board. Jon Foreman punctuates the chorus with a loud shout of "WHOA! Gravity", which explains the exclamation mark in the title. There are other goofy little touches like Jerome's off-key banging on the piano as a quick segue from the chorus into the second verse. I honestly couldn't tell you what's going on with the lyrics here - there's talk of "Sons of our enemies" and the pentagon and red lines being drawn - if something political's being said here, I feel rather out of the loop because I don't know what it is or what this "gravity" is that's preventing us from keeping it together.

American Dream
'Cause baby's always talkin' 'bout a ring
And talk has always been the cheapest thing
Is it true, would you do what I want you to
If I show up with the right amount of bling?
The band doesn't miss a single beat before getting the second track going with another thick guitar riff - there's a bit of Jerome's synth punctuating the chorus here, and in general it's another solid burst of energy from a band which manages to sound angry and joyful all at once with what is admittedly another tirade on commercialism. Seriously, Jon Foreman isn't saying much in this song about how "I want to live and die for bigger things" that he didn't say in "Gone" two albums ago. He just does it faster and louder, and with a different style of witty wordplay (the brand name "Lexus" is even used again, though this time around they've figured out that it makes a really good rhyme for "success" and "excess"). While I kind of rolled my eyes at this song when I first heard it due to it being yet another declaration that the point of life isn't just about who can amass the most stuff (I know that, so why don't you discuss the bigger things that you guys are living for?), it's really managed to win me over with its urgent shouting (check out the noisy bridge section that they managed to come up with) and the overall excitability of a band that's rebounded a bit from the downcast themes that they dealt with on their previous album.

Dirty Second Hands
Are you really as tough as you think?
You blink, and you're over the brink
You bleed, but your blood runs pink...
If I could point at any one song that would show how much progress Switchfoot has made since they "went mainstream", I'd offer this one as Exhibit A. It's everything you've come to expect from a good rocking Switchfoot song - an irresistible hook, a great set of lyrics to puzzle over, punchy drumming, an explosive chorus, a quirky bit of weird instrumentation to keep you guessing - but it manages to pull all of this off while employing a highly unpredictable rhythmic structure. The sound of a dobro or some similarly twangy instrument leads us into a swirling vortex of a verse where the rhythm slams and swells and makes it rather difficult to figure out the actual time signature (it seems to be 5/8, switching to 6/8 for the chorus and other parts of the song while managing to make the original riff work within both rhythmic patterns). There are these fun little bits in between Jon's lyrics where someone else in the band pants like a dog for no apparent reason, and Jon gives one of his most stellar performances, going from the ironic tones of each verse to the near-shout of the noisy chorus, to a section at the end of the song where he's hurriedly switching back and forth between speaking in time with the weird rhythm and singing a snippet of the chorus. The band jumps around so much that the song's over before you know it, and you never have the chance to get bored. The song's title appears to be a double entendre, since time is referred to as being a thief, but it also seems like "second hands" is used in the sense of used items being handed down, as if a person is railing against some unknown force based on inherited anger that they don't even understand the reasons behind. That's my best guess at an interpretation, and despite my overall cluelessness regarding the meaning, this one easily stands out as one of the best songs Switchfoot has ever done, even rising above several of their classic hits in my mind. I kind of wish more of the album had taken this drastic of an approach.

Awakening
Last week found me living for nothing but deadlines
With my dead beat sky
But this town doesn't look the same tonight...
After an intro which features the brief distant call of John's voice in the distant, mimicking the melody of the main guitar riff, Chad Butler once again proves himself to be an awesome drummer by giving off a few bursts of percussive energy that lead us into an otherwise more relaxed song. The song is still quite upbeat and hooky, but it does serve as a bit of a breather after the intense rocking trilogy that opened the album. This one feels a tiny bit like a version of "More than Fine" with less programming and production tricks, and more raw passion. One line that stands out to me is in the bridge - "I want to wake up kicking and screaming, I want to live like I know what I'm leaving." The song seems to describe the modern world with all of its gadgets and distractions as a bit of a dream state which one must awaken from in order to discover... well, whatever that wonderful "more" is that Switchfoot is constantly alluding to.

Circles
Don't believe that there's nothing that's true
Don't believe in this modern machine...
OK, so I know we don't hear pop/rock songs in 5/8 time that much, but if you're the type of person who can identify such a rhythm, have you ever noticed that they almost always resolve to 6/8 for the chorus? That's what this song, initially a swirling meditation strummed out by an acoustic guitar, does by the time it gets to its electrified chorus. As a song dedicated to the frivolity of living life with the post-modern mindset that there is no truth and you can basically make up your own as it goes along, I think that the repetitiveness of the lyrics sort of makes sense here, but it's still gonna bug some people that all the say in the chorus is "Spinning out in circles, in circles." I find it to be one of the strongest tracks on the album, just due to the rhythmic experimentation, especially at the end when the acoustic and electric guitar seem to be playing in different rhythms, while the vocal tag "Ba ba ba ba" seems to be in 5/8, but out of synch with the acoustic guitar. It doesn't hurt that fellow San Diego natives Sean Watkins and Sara Watkins (better known as two-thirds of the folk band Nickel Creek) help out here - that's an enormous amount of musical talent to have hanging around your studio, though if Sara is playing her violin, I can't hear it. It does sound like they might be adding to the background vocals, though, and I'm sure Sean contributed some acoustic guitar.

Amateur Lovers
I can tell you what you're thinking now
Before you think it you can settle down
Our lovin' isn't gonna burn us out...
Remember how every Switchfoot album used to have one obvious "fun and goofy" song that was mostly there to make you chuckle? They've kind of lost that on recent albums, though "Gone" did sort of play that role on The Beautiful Letdown, or maybe "Adding to the Noise", though those were less outright humorous and more the type of song that would throw out a witty pun while making a serious point. This song, I don't know about. It seems to want to be goofy and carefree, and in many ways it feels like it's mixing a little of the old Legend of Chin spirit with a little bit of "Easier than Love" and a little bit of "Poparazzi". It's basically a song that points out how clueless we are when it comes to loving people, but states that this shouldn't stop us from trying. What this has to do with the shout-outs to Southern California freeways that they're driving down, I honestly don't know, but it does make for a good top-down summer driving song if you're inclined to hit such highways in search of adventure. There's a bit of jaunty piano, a bit of grinding guitar, and even some sitar or weird Eastern instrument humming in the background of the second verse. What simultaneously irks and amuses me here is that Jon is a total spaz - he loves to shout the credo "We don't know what we're doing, let's do it again!" over and over, and at the end he becomes a little unhinged, sputtering the word "P-p-p-p-p-professional!" several times. It can get on my nerves some days, but it depends on my mood.

Faust, Midas and Myself
I woke up from my dream as a golden man
With a girl I've never seen, with golden skin...
While this song, a retelling of a dream with touches of mournful harmonica and a string section chiming in here and there, seems to have an attitude much like some old favorites from The Legend of Chin, it definitely doesn't sound like that album. I'd be hard-pressed to say if it sounded like anything Switchfoot had done before - the song's so schizophrenic, bopping along with its bouncy guitar riff and a tambourine at times, and grinding along in more of a heavy fashion at other times. If the title didn't clue you in that these guys were philosophy majors, then I don't know what will. For those who don't know what a "Faust" is (I didn't), it's a person who makes a deal with the Devil, which is what Jon does in his dream, apparently trading his soul for the ability to turn everything into gold (which is where the "Midas" part comes in, I guess, since there's no mention of him getting his tires changed). It doesn't take him too long to realize that his life with a golden house and a golden girl and a heart of gold that can't even beat is a pretty bogus one, and the dream becomes a nightmare as he begs to wake up and be with his normal life in his modest house again. (Yeah, I know, some of you think that any popular band with a song on the radio probably isn't that bad off financially, and the members of Switchfoot probably can afford some luxuries, but that doesn't mean they're swimming in gold-plated pools or anything, and anyway, it's when you're faced with how to handle decent sums of money that you end up thinking about issues like this the most.) The repeated cries of "What direction, what direction?" do get a bit tedious in the middle of this song, if for no other reason than that they seem to be a bit of a catch phrase for Switchfoot's ever-present existential pondering, without really fleshing out what the "directions" offered to this individual really are. I enjoy these songs for the values that they express, but at the end of the day I'm not left with much more of a moral to the story than "Don't like your money and your toys too much."

Head Over Heels (In This Life)
I'm coming down like a gunshot
In all these battles I've fought
You're the mark I'm aiming for
I was yours...
"What direction?" is actually probably a question that could apply to this song. From an "ear candy" perspective, I can't criticize it too much, since it has an interestingly dramatic chord progression in the mellower verses before getting revved up for a straightforward chorus. But it does feel like a bit of a praise anthem that couldn't make up its mind whether it wanted to be gentle and soft-spoken like "You" or "Only Hope", or more joyous and upbeat. "Sooner or Later" had the same problems several albums back, though this one's probably a stronger song. It just feels a bit too easy to just declare oneself to be "Head over heels" and proclaim that "In this life, you're the one place I call home" - it's like we've gone from existential crisis to total trust in God and we're missing a step in between. Nevertheless, Jon later declares some interesting things such as "In this life, you're the flower and the thorn", so at least there's still some difficulty there, some weight to this commitment that must be wrestled with. The band flirts with cliches a bit too much here, but I do enjoy that they're even playing up the mellower, more CCM radio-friendly tracks with a bit of the same energy that permeates most of the album, and didn't always figure in to the more low-key songs from their early days (which is why I think they've improved as a band - their sound is more consistent and there's no whiplash when going from one track to the next).

Yesterdays
Adrift on your ocean floor
I feel weightless, numb, and sore
A part of you in me is torn
And you're free...
One thing to be said for these quieter songs is that I do notice Tim Foreman's bass more readily. In the dense theatrics of some of their other songs, I can't always pick him out. The band does a nice job here of creating a ballad with a slightly better flow to it than "On Fire" or "The Blues" had on past albums - it's quiet and ambient, but breezy. Chad gently taps along, keeping a brisk but subdued rhythm, and there's a gentle vocal echo in the background here and there. This song has a sentimentality to it that might strike some as refreshing, even though to me, this ode to a friend who apparently passed away seems a little misplaced. I guess the connection is that this person whose flame was snuffed out reminded Jon of the value left in his own life and the seemingly short time left in which to make use of it. I do like the observation that "Every lament is a love song" - it points to hope that helps to mitigate the grief - and I also enjoy that effortless way that this song segues out of the track before it and into the one after it. However, it's still my least favorite track from the album - which I guess is saying a lot, if I can even find this album's least interesting song to be of decent value, unlike the gratingly obvious "We Are One Tonight", the awkward and rushed "Redemption", or the plodding and dull weak spots on the early albums ("The Economy of Mercy", "Amy's Song", "You").

Burn Out Bright
The future is a question mark
Of kerosene and electric sparks
There's still fire in you yet...
Now's a good time to get back to the upbeat tunes - three medium-to-slow songs in a row wasn't the wisest move to make in the back half of an otherwise energetic album. Thematically, this bouncy anthem is a good follow-up to "Yesterdays" because it talks about the brevity of life and declares, "Before I die, I want to burn out bright". However, it feels like one too many times that the band has reminded us that "you only get one life". You can repackage "This Is Your Life" in a million different tempos and beef it up with guitar funk and staccato riffing and punctuated shouts and all that, but it's still essentially a song that we've heard at least three times before. This song has one of those fun, slam-bang endings that really has its effect dulled by the choice to let the last note ring out and fade naturally, rather than stopping in more of an abrupt fashion. Given the subject matter, they should have just gone for the abrupt cut and a clever segue into the next track.

4:12
Waiting tables and parking cars
You've been selling cell phones at the shopping mall
And you began to believe that all you are is material
It's nonsensical...
Switchfoot pulls a Delirious? trick here by titling a song after something that shows up in the first verse and doesn't really work well to describe the song as a whole. As far as Switchfoot's quirky side goes, this feisty little track with its one-note guitar riff, hand claps in the second verse, and random blurts from a trumpet, pretty much defines the band's penchant for being weird while also being totally catchy. But is the song really about a person who wakes up at 4:12 everyday? (And who wakes up at such a precise time to begin with - don't you normally say you wake up around 4 or 4:15 or whatever, or does he really set his alarm for that exact time everyday? Things you wonder about when you overanalyze lyrics as much as I do. Maybe Switchfoot just likes numbers that are multiples of four, such as "24".) It seems to be more about the overall tediousness of a person's daily routine, holding some mundane job and allowing the repeating patterns to numb you into thinking that this is all you're meant to do until the day you die, and that bigger questions about your soul and your purpose in life aren't things that you have time to deal with. The song does feel a bit schizophrenic as it unfolds, slowing to a slightly quieter section midway through and transforming into a rallying cry near the end, as the guys bring back the weird trumpet and the hand-clapping and excitedly declare again and again, "Souls aren't built of stone! Souls aren't built of stone, sticks and bones!" This does lead up to one of those fun, abrupt endings that I had wished for earlier, so I guess I can't complain.

Let Your Love Be Strong
Maybe I'm just idealistic to assume
That truth could be fact and form
That love could be a verb
Maybe I'm just a little misinformed...
I initially declared this final song to be Switchfoot's weakest album closer since "Under the Floor", and now that I've gotten a little more used to it, I've realized that this is unfair. It takes a few tries for the rhythm of Jon's gentle lyrical ponderings against the plucking of the acoustic guitar to congeal in your mind - it just sounds sloppy at first, but the strings and Chad's slow drum march in the second verse help to flesh it out, giving it a very dramatic flourish. Jon does seem to be forcing out the notes at times, as if he's attempting theatrics that his unique voice wasn't really built for. The song does seem to hint at an overall theme for the album, which seems to be "Love with zeal and passion even if you're not quite sure what you're doing, because that beats the emotionless, grey world that you find yourself in when you live life as a cynic." That's something a little different than the "more to life" theme, so I'll give Switchfoot a little credit for not totally repeating themselves. And they've done us a favor by not letting a closing acoustic ballad be a total cliche here, due to the other instrumental embellishments that they've added on to make it a more beautiful piece of music.

Songs like "Let Your Love Be Strong", "Dirty Second Hands", and the title track hint at a hope that I have for Switchfoot's future - that they move past the vague searching for something more in their lyrics, since it's a question they've already done a fine job of posing to their listeners, and start to declare, "OK. I accept that there's something more, and knowing some of what that is, what do I change in my life as a response to that?" On this album, it's the resolve to end the cycle of cynicism. That seems to be a response to the "everything is meaningless" theme that they explored on Nothing Is Sound - you realize that everything in life is eventually going to let you down, and once you get past the sickening, downtrodden feeling that this realization leaves you with, you eventually have to turn around and say, "You know what? That's not going to mean that I give up and just resolve to be a big letdown to everyone. I'm going to try for more, with all that I have within me, even though I know I will sometimes fail at it." So there's a little bit of a progression here - I just want Switchfoot to fully embrace that thematic progression and not feel like they have to keep going back to recap Chapter 1 of every Christian's life story on every album that they ever release. Switchfoot has gotten to a point where there are people listening to their music despite not agreeing with their religious beliefs, and I think that's great - lots of Christian musicians hope to achieve that and never do. Now it's time to accept that they're still going to listen to you even if they haven't bought into your basic theological premise yet, and move on and give their entire audience a bigger helping of meatier subject matter - something that has a little more gravity, I guess.

ALBUM WORTH:
Oh! Gravity $2
American Dream $1.50
Dirty Second Hands $2
Awakening $1.50
Circles $1.50
Amateur Lovers $1
Faust, Midas, and Myself $1
Head Over Heels (In This Life) $1
Yesterdays $1
Burn Out Bright $1
4:12 $1.50
Let Your Love Be Strong $1.50
TOTAL: $16.50

Band Members:
Jon Foreman: Lead vocals, guitars
Tim Foreman: Bass, backing vocals
Chad Butler: Drums
Jerome Fontamillas: Keyboards, guitars
Andrew Shirley: Guitars

Website: http://www.switchfoot.com

Recommended: Yes

Great Music to Play While: Driving