Relient K: Five Score And Seven Years Ago (2007)

Tracks:

1. Pleading The Fifth (A Cappella)
2. Come Right Out and Say It
3. I Need You
4. The Best Thing
5. Forgiven
6. Must Have Done Something Right
7. Give Until There's Nothing Left
8. Devastation and Reform
9. I'm Taking You With Me
10. Faking My Own Suicide
11. Crayons Can Melt On Us For All I Care
12. Bite My Tongue
13. Up and Up
14. Deathbed

 After a three-year hiatus--broken only by the Apathetic EP from '05--Relient K released their next full-length album, the retrospectively-entitled Five Score and Seven Years Ago.  The band had went through some changes in the interim, reflected in the cleverly-staged cover image of five guys casting four shadows: Brian Pittman has departed and John Warne has replaced him on bass, joined by second guitarist Jon Schneck.  The addition of a second axman beefed up the band's already heavier sound, and freed Matt Thiessen to play even more piano on stage and in the studio.  

But there's more: The band is definitely growing up.  If MMHMM was the sound of the sophomores getting some upper class maturity, then Five Score is their senior prom.  The songs are definitely leaving behind the teenage melodrama and sardonic wordplay, and dealing with the big questions: Life, death, and crayons.  Okay, there's still a little of the cutesy wordplay here and there, but now the lyrics are more streamlined, desperate, and straightforward; Thiessen's got three years of growth to sing about, and he doesn't have time for Willie Aames to chime in or Panthro to warm up the ThunderTank.  After the obligatory a cappella intro, the album dives in with "Come Right Out and Say It," which picks up where "Let It All Out" left off: "Why don't you come right out and say it?  Even if the words are probably gonna hurt
I'd rather have the truth than something insincere."  The next track, "I Need You" is even more blunt: "I need you like you would not believe/You're the only thing I want cause you're everything I need."  There's less of the cleverness of yore and more immediacy and desperation, as Thiessen wants God (and his loved ones) to save him from the bad place he's found himself in.

The big hit is "Forgiven," which sets a new standard for contrition mixed with confrontation.  Beginning with a catchy keyboard riff, Thiessen dives into a two-way inquisition of sorts, acknowledging the rift between the first and second party: "And you can't see past the blood on my hands to see that you've been aptly damned to fail and fail again."  He then confesses that all of us are guilty of "thinking the thoughts whether or not we see them through," and that we've all been forgiven by the Final Judge, so we might as well lay our sins on the line and let them go.  

What really sets Five Score apart from its predecessors is the band's new preoccupation with death.  "Faking My Own Suicide," a country knockoff complete with pedal steel and banjo, presents the confession of a hurting romantic using self-harm--at least figuratively--as a manipulation tactic to earn sympathy from an estranged other.  The real "grateful dead" is the epic 11-minute closer, the morbidly appropriate "Deathbed."  A long first-person account of a wayward elder dying of lung cancer, Thiessen paints a sweeping but sad portrait of a life wasted in drinking, smoking, loveless matrimony, and bowling.  Finally, the singer sees a window of redemption open up--apparently accompanied by a chamber orchestra--and exhales his final rasp in a cry of deliverance to Jesus, portrayed by none other than Jon Forman of Switchfoot, who sings our hero into the Promised Land.  (Good casting, by the way, since Switchfoot are kind of like a musical older brother to the Canton boys.)

It's not all gloom, doom, and ka-boom: Thiessen sings the praises of his significant other in "Must Have Done Something Right," obviously taking a page out of the Bob Carlisle Playbook of Happy Accidents.  It's a nice flash of light in a largely gun metal gray block of emotional turmoil and morbid reflection.  Well, maybe that's a bit much.  The point is, the K are becoming a full-grown punk artist, and now have the actual gravitas to (gulp) be taken seriously.