Review Summary: The ugly letdown.
The contemporary Christian music scene can be suffocating. More often than not, artists churn out albums on a nigh-yearly basis, and the hunt is always on for the next "Christian version of (Flavor of the Month band here)" -- artistic development and creativity are rarely high priorities. It's no surprise that many Christian bands prefer to dodge the label -- artistic concerns aside, there's obviously more of a market if you don't limit your target audience to one faith.
But Switchfoot was historically an anomaly, a band that was unabashedly a part of the Christian music industry and insisted on pushing the envelope -- at least a little bit. Their blend of post-grunge and indie-pop wasn't groundbreaking, but their early albums were diverse and soulful (
Oh!Gravity. chief among them). Of course, they made a killing by recycling the same lyrical ideas epitomized in "We were meant to live for so much more" ad nauseum, but they were passionate, they wrote catchy songs, and they remained a standout in their admittedly shallow field.
Fading West, unfortunately, sees Switchfoot throwing all of that out the window in favor of a remarkably blasé, soulless cash-in, thinly disguised as a "shout-out to the homeland" from a band whose California roots meant approximately nothing to them, musically speaking, over their previous eight albums. And it's a shame.
There's been some backlash from fans crying "sellout", just because of the presence of pitch correction and a slight electronic influence. But it's not really that drastic of an evolution-- pop has been absorbing these fads for years now, and Switchfoot, at heart, has always been at least 50 percent pop. No,
Fading West's disappointment lies in its lack of substance. Sure, "Meant to Live" and "Dare You To Move" were cliché, but Jon Foreman at least sounded like he cared. "Who We Are" seems to aim for the same Hallmark-level inspirational heights, but "We know who we are (we've got nothing left to lose)...there's still time enough to choose" rings hollow -- and the children's choir is downright tacky. "Say It Like You Mean It" relies on nu-metal trappings that were dated a decade ago, and Foreman does nothing to redeem it -- the chorus is just the title, repeated over and over.
It's impossible to avoid comparing
Fading West to the band's biggest hits, because it seems obvious that Foreman and company are struggling to forcibly churn out a hit of the same magnitude. And sometimes, it almost works -- the soft rock anthem"Slipping Away" is so obviously designed to be a stadium-filler that it nearly succeeds, only to be brought down by a trite chorus ("If I could say it just the way that I'm feeling...the words that I wanted to say, I feel them slipping away"). But sometimes it fails out of the gate -- "The World You Want" is a more passive-aggressive, guilt-ridden "Dare You To Move" with lethargic strings, overblown sentiments, and not an ounce of emotion.
Even if I force myself to forget the rest of Switchfoot's discography, this album struggles. Every song is disgustingly overproduced, and halfway through the album, I'm begging for a tempo faster than "comatose." When I finally get that in "Saltwater Heart," it's a by-the-numbers jingle that's begging to be in a Macy's summer sale commercial. And this is where the lack of substance
Fading West reveals itself most prominently: everything is so inoffensive, so obviously catered to the lowest common denominator, so
safe that even its worst failures are unremarkable, even listenable. Considering that this band once moved millions by daring us to move, it's disheartening to find them so unwilling to budge outside of an increasingly narrow comfort zone.
