Then when Oh Gravity! hit shelves in late 2006, the lack of an overpowering lead single forced critics to give the entire album a listen. Across the board, those reviewers were pleasantly surprised by what they found. That disc, combined with lead singer/guitarist Jon Foreman's solo albums released last year, have led many in the mainstream music community to see what those of us who have been listening to the band since 1997's The Legend of Chin have known all along: Switchfoot is a group of immensely creative musicians, and Jon Foreman is one of the most talented and prolific songwriters of our generation.
And now comes the highly anticipated Hello Hurricane, the first album since hitting it big that Switchfoot has made without record label executives peering over their shoulders. Musically, this album continues in the direction Oh Gravity! started them on. Gone is the pristine production and mixing of John Fields, who oversaw the recording of Beautiful Letdown and Nothing is Sound (the latter takes it to the extreme--the first couple tracks are some of the cleanest rock ever recorded). The result is a sound that betrays any accusation that Switchfoot is overly careful and calculative--this is simply a band having the time of their life playing music they love.
But while Gravity has a very natural, free-flowing feel, Hurricane wrestles a bit more. Nearly every song has its own style, making the album feel a bit disjointed at times. The first five tracks alone give you the delayed guitars and soaring chorus of classic U2 ("Needle and Haystack Life"), a ballad Christian radio will love ("Your Love is a Song"), and a mid-tempo retro 80's track ("Enough to Let Me Go"), broken up by two of Switchfoot's most aggressive tracks yet, lead singles "Mess of Me" and "The Sound (John M. Perkins Blues)." Here's the thing that makes it work, though: it's all really good. What excites me most is the classic rock flavorings more evident here than any of the band's previous work. "Free" and "Bullet Soul" sound like they could have been written in the early 70's.
Lyrically, there are two dominant and interconnected themes on the record. First, Foreman feels stuck, bound by his own sinful nature and the trappings of culture to live in a world he knows is far less than ideal. While this is certainly familiar territory for him, he pushes out toward facets of this not previously explored, like racism ("The Sound") and our culture's fragmentary tendency to prescribe a drug for any perceived problem ("Mess of Me").
Second, he is convinced of the overwhelming power of love to overcome. "The Sound," co-named for racial reconciliation and community development advocate John M. Perkins, is a case-study in this theme. The love Foreman is singing of (and of which Perkins writes) is not the sentimental, I-wish-we-could-all-get-along kind, but the subversive kind that loves in the face of hate and refuses to participate in its violence. Foreman sings, "John Perkins said it right...Love is the final fight...let it rise above, rise above...there is no sound...louder than love!" This theme is repeated later in "Bullet Soul": "Love is the one true innovation...Love is the only art."
The only qualm I have has to do with the first theme, and it's more of a question than an actual qualm. Multiple times throughout the album, Foreman seems to be singing of being stuck inside the "cage" of his body. This idea is certainly borrowed from the apostle Paul's writings in the New Testament, but I fear they reflect a common misunderstanding of those writings. In the second verse of "Mess of Me," Foreman appears to be lamenting that our essential selves are stuck in our sinful nature (exactly what Paul was saying). In "Free," however, when he sings "Inside this shell there's a prison cell," or in "Red Eyes" when he sings, "All of my days are spent within this skin; within this cage that I'm in," he's a bit too close for my comfort to the body-soul dualism of Greek and Enlightenment philosophy. I know this may be a bit too complex an issue to try and distill from rock lyrics, but it's such a dominant theme on the album--I wish I could have a conversation with Jon to find out what his perspectives are.
In short, where else do you expect to be than in your own skin? The orthodox Christian belief about afterlife, contrary to popular opinion, has always been in the resurrection of the body. We're not just souls caged inside of a body that one day we'll escape from. I am my body. My body is me. I can not be separated from it. One day are bodies will be made perfect, Paul writes, but our 'souls' aren't going anywhere. The soul is not a substantive object. It doesn't exist somewhere inside our body - it's a metaphor for our essential selves.
Alright, enough of that for now. This is a CD review (a long one, I know), and the CD is a good one. I would give you the highlights, but I would have to name at least 8 or 9 songs. I've yet to hear a song written by Jon Foreman that was uninteresting, and Hello Hurricane contains no exceptions. Right now my favorites are "Your Love is a Song" and "The Sound," but ask me next week and they might be different.
