Review: Relient K - "Five Score and Seven Years Ago"

Relient K - "Five Score and Seven Years Ago"
(Goatee Records, 2007)

For all the "pop-punk" bluster, Relient K is yet another contemporary Christian band trying to gain mainstream appeal by latching on to the flavor of the moment. They've been doing it with varying success since their 2000 debut Relient K and on this, their fifth album in seven years (hence the snarky title) they're still managing to craft hooks that are catchy enough to attract radio programmers while keeping the Christian kids feeling hip even when their parents won't let them listen to Fall Out Boy yet. The problem is, even after nearly a decade as a band, Relient K hasn't found a distinct voice. They sound like every pop-punker to come before them, and though their music is well produced, it isn't distinctive. Singles like "Come Right Out And Say It" and "I Need You" sound like clones of each other. "Forgiven" opens with an eerie tense piano solo but then devolves into a stuttery Jimmy Eat World-style guitar solo and one of the more boring choruses on the album. And even more amusing tracks, such as the vaguely country track "Faking My Own Suicide," come off too tongue-in-cheek to be taken seriously. The band's suffering the same kind of fate as Bowling For Soup; soon they'll be thirty-year-old rockers trying to sing about their high school days -- what then? Fact is most bands in their chosen genre don't age gracefully. If the band doesn't make a marked stylistic development or two in the coming years, albums like this one will rightly label them footnotes in modern music history. What drags Five Score and Seven Years Ago down is its inability to stand out from the crowd, to make a listener think, to provoke any emotion other than boredom. That, my friends, isn't something most bands would want to put on their resume. All but the most dedicated of Relient K fans are likely to agree that this isn't an album worthy of adding to a CD collection either.