Tori Amos - Abnormally Attracted to Sin
Missy Higgins - The Ol' Razzle Dazzle
Jars of Clay - The Long Fall Back to Earth
John Mayer - Born and Raised
Pearl Jam - Vs
Seal - Human Being
It's taken me a long time to get around to listening to The Long Fall Back to Earth. It is yet another of the CDs that I bought in the latter part of last year in a huge binge, knowing that it might take some time to work through them all. And in this case it had to at least wait until I had absorbed an earlier Jars of Clay release, Redemption Songs.
On first listen I had thought that my reaction to The Long Fall Back to Earth might be similar, one of mild disappointment at the level of inspiration. That would make several Jars of Clay albums in a row that hadn't been overly impressive, and to be honest during some of that first listen I was beginning to wonder if it was time to 'let go' of the band and just accept that I was no longer going to find their new work all that satisfying.
But then I started hearing things that I responded to. Partly it was that some tracks in the second half of the album made a better impression, but then as I listened to the whole album a second, third, fourth time, I enjoyed more of the songs throughout the record.
I think part of my difficulty was that this is very much a 'pop' record, perhaps the most pop one of Jars of Clay's career. They've never exactly been far from the mainstream anyway, but here they are supplying songs that are unashamedly in the pop mould, and borrowing particularly heavily from the 1980s. A song like 'Heaven' (actually one of the more rock-oriented tracks) could have been planted by a time traveller into a radio broadcast circa 1984 and few people would have noticed.
And on that basis a lot of the songs work. Yes, in some ways their lyrical ideas are simpler and less subtle than in what I would consider the best of the band's songs, without the beautiful turns of phrase, but only a few of the songs veer into sounding trite.
There's enough here to make me continue to be interested in the band's 'future' work - they released a new album last week, so I'm still a couple behind. In truth I'm not sure I've ever felt they are a band that delivers albums without weak points (other than their 3rd album, If I Left the Zoo), but so long as the strong tracks outweigh the poor I'll probably keep listening. And make one hell of a 'best of' mix for myself at some point.
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