Third Day: Conspiracy No. 5 (1997)

Tracks:

1. Peace
2. You Make Me Mad
3. How's Your Head
4. Alien
5. I Deserve?
6. Have Mercy
7. My Hope is You
8. More to This
9. This Song Was Meant for You
10. Who I Am
11. Give Me a Reason
12. Gomer's Theme
13. Your Love Endures 

After hitting the road with their first album's worth of songs, the Georgia boys decided that they needed to diversify their sound a bit, rock a little harder, sound a little bit "dirtier," and generally change things up.  So they hired Sam Taylor, producer of such hard and dirty-sounding bands as King's X and Galactic Cowboys, to sit in the big chair for their sophomore effort, Conspiracy No. 5.  (Sarcasm?  You betcha, Moonpie.)

Hoo boy, what a mess!  What they ended up with is a misguided effort to re-imagine TD as a southern grunge band.  Third Day was placed on this planet to play Southern-fried gospel rock, not be the second coming of Nirvana.  And the band (whether they themselves or those around them) undergo a weird make-over from their music to their image.  One only needs to look at a group picture from this period to see how wrong it was.   Ultimately, the less said about Mac's "hipster geek" look the better, so I'll just move on...

The psychosis manifested itself not in the writing of the songs, but in the recording and production.  And this is where I lay the blame squarely on the shoulders of the mononymous Sam (as he is credited, obviously because he didn't want anybody to track him down after this).  Because the songs themselves are mostly fine: classic rock and worship songs written in the fun, down-home TD style.  What Sam did was to drown these tunes in a shady, psycho-funkadelic swamp of buzzy, swirly, feedback-drenched noise, to the point where you can't hear the music. 

I'm sure the band had a role in selecting the ponderous pile of effects boxes, crappy amps, and weird tape effects that dominate the guitars on the album, but really, a producer's job, especially for a young artist, is to guide them in a direction that makes the most of the band's strengths and make them sound their best, not turn them into a genetic mutation of themselves.  I'll give one example to show where it all went wrong: Track 3 is a brilliant, Byrds-y folk rocker that Mac wrote for his ailing wife, "How's Your Head."  It's a deeply personal song that has a powerful if somewhat ominous melody and some funky playing.  And for the most part it's great until the end, where it literally disintegrates into a pile of grinding noises and feedback.  I could point out others, but as Mac said, if I can't say nothing good, I won't say nothing at all.

So here's something good: The songs themselves show some maturity and growth.  There's the aforementioned song, as well as "I Deserve?", a haunting confessional song about humbling yourself before someone and asking forgiveness.  These personal songs show a vulnerability that is very appealing and suits Mac's persona well.  Then's there's biblical rockers like "My Hope is You" (from Psalm 25 & 39, among others),  and "Gomer's Theme," based on the book of Hosea.  The latter, despite its odd title, is actually a pretty moving story:  It's written from the Old Testament prophet's perspective as he pines for his unfaithful wife Gomer (It was the OT, Okay?  Those Hebrews gave their baby girls names like Abishag, Orpah, and Zilpah).  The band comes up with an appropriately moving song, concluded with a ten-second solo from Avery that is some of his most gut-wrenching playing ever.

And then there's cultural critiques like "You Make Me Mad" and "More To This," fast rockers like "Have Mercy," confessional heartbreakers like "Who I Am," and the closing "Your Love Endures," another psalm adaptation that's just Mac, Mark, and their acoustics.   All in all, a pretty good batch of songs, although their choice of a single, the droning, effects-laden "Alien," was a bit of a misfire.  It kind of sums up the problem of Conspiracy, a title that is never fully explained, although with all of the pictures of assassinated presidents in the booklet, perhaps they were trying to provide a "fifth rail" for how and why these murders took place?  Here's my theory:  Maybe somebody traveled through time and space and paid personal visits to John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Sirhan Sirhan and played them the album's final mix at full volume.  That'd make me mad enough to go postal, for sure!    

But better things were coming, as the boys would figure out the best way to present their rocking, Jesus-centered music to the world--even the assassins.