Review Summary: The album they always had in them
Switchfoot have always been a pop band at heart. Sure, the musical tides of the 90's may have pulled them toward Foos-esque post grunge, and the 00's saw them adopt crunchy guitar leads with stadium-styled choruses, but these always sounded like outside impositions, never the bands core identity. Underneath one could always hear a simple, breezy pop-rock band wanting to be set free. "Hello Hurricane" was a step in the right direction, but the transformation felt incomplete. "Fading West" finally shows the band liberated.
The largest step forward on this album is Switchfoot's use of different timbres. You could hear them experimenting with different sounds earlier in their career (see the synth chimes in the outro to "On Fire," the plucked piano in "Oh, Gravity") but here this tendency is fully realized. Some times it comes in the form of unusual instruments (the sitar in "Say it Like you Mean it") and other times just through interesting production choices (the thunderous bass drum on on "The World You Want," the headphone-worthy synth solo in "Love Alone is Worth the Fight"). While this can be seen as a distraction from the actual playing, which is mostly standard apart from an awesome bass line on "Ba55," Switchfoot was never a band to go to for virtuosity or technicality in the first place.
What has always been one of Switchfoot's main attractions is Jon Foreman's lyrics. "Fading West" can be seen as closing a loose narrative that has been running through the bands lyrics since their first album. They began as college kids, writing songs about girls and chem class, made it big writing inspirational (if somewhat Hallmarky) choruses (DARE YOU TO MOOOOOOVE), became cynical and wrote about politics and meaninglessness, and here are able to return to inspirational up-beat anthems, but older and wiser, acknowledging the necessary fakery of the world while still clinging to genuinity. The best example of this is the song "Love Alone is Worth the Fight" which in the verses describe feeling washed up and sick of the world (The funny thing about a name is/You forget what the reason you were playing the game is/And it's all an illusion/A 21st century institution) while the chorus optimistically chants the song's title. Their idealism now feels earned, and their pessimism counterbalanced.
The overall emotion this album gives is elation. The songs are catchy (but not surupy), simply (but never un-interesting except for "All or Nothing at All"), and the lyrics are inspirational (but not saccharine) Switchfoot finally feels like the band they always were.
