The guitars are back.
It’s been a long road since Switchfoot last made a guitar-centric album, arguably since 2011’s Vice Verses. In the interim, they’ve experimented with electronica, pop, and hip-hop elements while turning the production shine up and the guitars down.
Many long-time fans were fine with this musical direction; this one was not. It’s always seemed to me to be a fundamental contradiction to make deeply personal and emotional music exploring questions of faith, humanity and philosophy, and then soak the songs in artificial studio effects. If the lyrics are raw, the music should match it—in my opinion, of course.
Forever Now, the San Diego quintet’s 14th studio album, announces itself with an electric guitar fanfare that launches leadoff cut “Wake Up, Mr. Crow.” It's a welcome sound, juicy, crunchy, fat and in your face, spotlighting the contribution of Boaz Roberts, the band’s newest member and lead guitarist. Jon Foreman (lead vocals, guitar) and Tim Foreman (bass, backing vocals), the brothers at the heart of the band, idolized Led Zeppelin back in high school and after a decade and a half in the pop wilderness, there’s a hint of that Zep swagger in the lead riff here, alternately bludgeoning and blazing as Jon Foreman alternately raps and exhorts his audience to get your mind right. “Why do I lie and say that I’m fine?” he asks at the chorus. “We’ve been living in strange times.”
Indeed.
In old-school Switchfoot style, second track “Absolution” barrels in riding a headlong riff and pushing bassline, with strong contributions also from Chad Butler (drums) and Jerome Fontamillas (keys, backing vocals). The riffy track offers a case study in how Jon Foreman frames things; you could choose to view the lyrics as the narrator looking to his partner to provide him with the emotional and spiritual sustenance he needs—the absolution. But if you know the band at all, you realize that the other plausible interpretation is that he’s asking for absolution from his Lord. This is how Foreman has done his work as a lyricist for decades now; he chooses his words thoughtfully so that people coming at the songs from a variety of different perspectives can find something to relate to in them—an emotion, a perspective, a situation, a feeling.
Track three, “Beautiful Life,” eases off on the thunder to examine living with anxiety, lying awake at night worrying and then opening your eyes to remind yourself “That you’re never alone in the fight… In the darkness, there’s always a light.” One key sequence gets to the heart of Foreman’s increasingly mid-life perspective: “Open my eyes to see / I don’t have what I want / But I have what I need” (that glass in front of you is half full, so quit focusing on the empty part).
The guitars return for “Shake The Dust,” an aggressive rocker with a fuzzed out riff and a powerful message: “Only love outlasts the living.” It’s a song about the sense of decay many of us feel today (“When your empire starts to rust”) and remembering what’s really important: love. Companion piece “Natural Causes” follows, a searching, rather U2-ish number full of ringing guitar and abundant space as Foreman sings “Love and only love survives / These natural causes.” They build steadily so that by the final moments, it’s positively majestic.
…and that’s where things go sideways, though thankfully not for long.
“YFWYA” (you forgot who you are) features an almost house-beat pulsing bass under Jon’s rapping. Someone must love this sound, but I don’t. “Same Blood” feels like a variation on the same theme, a quick rhythm section with Jon speed-singing, this time through vocal filters that make the whole thing feel overly affected. “Ride Or Die” triples down with more distorted vocals and guitars and a lyric riddled with clichés.
Things get back on track with “Darkness,” another lilting, airy, atmospheric number that is as literal and narrative in style as any Jon Foreman lyric ever, as he tells stories from his own life and wrestles with the contradictions and corruption he encounters inside his own faith. “Broken Wings” is strummy, earnest and searching: classic Switchfoot, in other words. Then “Two Twins” arrives, a funk-blues foundation for a parable that attempts to prove the existence of God and heaven. It’s clever and thoughtful whether or not you agree with its conclusion.
Penultimate track “Breaking Up Again” sounds like it’s just Jon Foreman and a single plucked guitar, a brief and simple meditative number about how “When you fight yourself / It’s hard to walk away.” The album closes out with “The Butterfly Effect,” narrating the last seven minutes at the end of a man’s life, between the moment when the heart stops beating and the brain stops functioning. There’s excessive echo, reverb and studio glitchiness, but it’s a cool concept for a song. (Forever Now has been described elsewhere as “a loose concept album” about the last day of a man’s life, which feels like a stretch to this listener, but sure.)
As always, Forever Now finds Jon Foreman asking hard questions without pretending to have all the answers. It’s thinking-person’s music, thankfully framed this time within a sound that feels more like classic Switchfoot than the trend-chasing band of the last 15 years. A few of these songs still feel overproduced and gimmicky, but overall, this is the best new Switchfoot record in many years.