At this point in the band’s career, I don’t think they were particularly adept at sustaining a good idea all the way through to the end of a song, which leads to some tracks taking odd left turns that don’t work for me at all. Even the stronger songs grow tiresome or boring before they’re over. The band’s attempts at comedy are always hit-and-miss, with comedy already being such a subjective consideration, (and all the more so with musical comedy) but not only does this album’s comedy fall flat for me - the songs do, too. It has a few notable “classics” such as album highlight “Pressing On,” but it’s an album that wears thin on my very quickly. I imagine that the only fans who rank this album very highly are those who most greatly prefer the pop-punk of the band’s first three or four albums, but even for fans who don’t necessarily prefer that early punk sound, most of them seem to like this album a great deal more than I do. Here’s the first of my wild hot takes for this band. Thankfully, the band rebounded in a big way, and if Theissen needed to make Collapsible Lung in order for him to later make Air For Free, then I’m glad this album exists. The lyrics are bland, the hooks are either forgettable or altogether absent, and as an RK album, it’s a sad departure from all of their strengths, especially coming directly after the wonderful and mature Forget and Not Slow Down. I love pop music, and this collection has maybe two or three songs that I would say are even moderate/average pop compositions. And I want to be clear that this album isn’t bad because it’s such a hard left-turn into pop music this album scores so lowly for me simply because I don’t think the writing is good. According to interviews, this pop project was something Theissen really needed to get out of his system, but I think it was a dangerous mistake to mar the band’s legacy with what seems to be most fans’ least favorite album. While the frontman has always been the primary force behind the band’s compositions, Theissen takes full control here, writing many of these songs with co-writers who were active in the pop game in the early 10’s, with only a few random writing credits appearing from band member Matthew Hoopes. It’s a vapid album that I, along with other RK fans, think would’ve been more correctly marketed as a Matt Theissen solo album. You’ll see later that two of my favorite RK albums are the official full-lengths that released immediately before and after this album, the confounding misstep from 2013 that offers close to nothing that I enjoy or can even recall. Having now put a good amount of time into dissecting these albums and seeing how well they hit me on musical, melodic, stylistic, lyrical, and comedic levels, here’s my ranking and review of each major release: However, it wasn’t until 2019 or so that I finally made the plunge and checked out the whole discography and it wasn’t until this past August that I filled in all the holes and listened to everything, from the independent release All Work No Play (which would be at the bottom of this list if I cared to include it) to the covers album Is for Karaoke. But I stayed aboard the hype train from 2007 through 2009, when the excellent Forget and Not Slow Down released, and the band had my interest enough that I gave 2016’s Air for Free a few chances, which eventually won me over and became another favorite of mine. My history with the band has been spotty, as I never really committed myself to checking out an entire album until Five Score and Seven Years Ago released in 2007 I’d missed the hype surrounding the earlier fan favorites and didn’t know much from the band’s first four albums outside of the singles. And we start today with Relient K!Īs tends to be the case with many (if not most) artists, I have my fair share of hot takes that will keep this from looking like your run-of-the-mill Relient K ranking. So, starting now, I’ve decided to turn my “Ranking and Reviews” into a separate series - related to but separate from the “Listening” series. However, I realized that this was leading to cumbersome versions of what should be quick and brief weekly columns. Any regular readers of my “What I’ve Been Listening To” series will know that I’m usually going through one or two artist discographies at a time, and I’ve often used those blogs to share a run-down of my overall thoughts, reviews, or rankings on said discography.
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