The Seven Albums of Switchfoot (Part 3: Oh! Gravity)

Oh! Gravity

Switchfoot's sixth studio album was released on December 26, 2006. The album debuted on the Billboard 100 at #18 as the second highest debut of that week.

Personality

This album has a lot of its own personality. It's different from anything else Switchfoot has ever done. And yet, it's the same. This album is reminiscent of The Legend of Chin. It's a goofy, playful, lighthearted album. It's like cracking a bad joke after a long serious conversation and it breaks the pattern of The Beautiful Letdown and Nothing is Sound.

The Album deals with serious issues, thematically, but like The Legend of Chin it does so in a playful and lighthearted way. It's a loud, aggressive, and fun album. 5/5.

Lyrics

The themes in Oh! Gravity are the same as we've come to expect from Switchfoot. I think the focus here is about breaking materialism. The track American Dream says, "When success is equated with excess/our ambition for excess wrecks us" and "I want out of this machine/it doesn't feel like freedom//this ain't my American Dream/I want to live and die for bigger things." In Awakening, an ambitious person awakes to the reality of life beyond the physical: "Last week found me living for nothing but deadlines/with my deadbeat sky but this town doesn't look the same tonight/these dreams started singing to me out of nowhere/and in all my life I don't know if I've ever felt so alive" and "Maybe it's called ambition/but you've been talking in your sleep/about a dream, we're awakening." The track titled 4:12 continues the same theme with, "I'm so sorry I've been so down/I started doubting things could ever turn around/and I began to believe that all we are is material/it's nonsensical."

Elsewhere, Yesterday (one of my favourite songs on the album) deals with the loss of a loved one. Amateur Lovers is a clever rehash of the themes introduced by Easier than Love in Nothing is Sound.

The track, Faust, Midas, and Myself is an interesting and complex song that deals with the pursuit of materialism and concludes, "You have one life/one life left to lead" and "What was once routine/was now the perfect joy."

So, with the same kind of themes we've come to expect from Switchfoot, I give Oh! Gravity 5/5 for its lyrics.

Sound

The lyrics are kind of seriousish, mostly. But the sound of this album is lighthearted. Oh! Gravity is the most raw album since The Legend of Chin, all the polish of The Beautiful Letdown and Nothing is Sound is gone. The sound of this album doesn't take itself seriously. In the title track, there's a moment where the heavy guitar sound breaks down and there are a couple of aggressive off-key piano key strokes before the guitar-heavy sound resumes.

Overall, I found that the album has a kind of pop-punk sound, but there are softer, slower songs like Yesterdays and Awakening.

So it's not a great sounding record but that's not the point. The point is that it's fun and it has a lighthearted sound. And I appreciate that. So I'll give it a 4/5 for sound.

Conclusion

Until I gave this album a good listen, I really didn't like it. I thought it was a major break from Switchfoot's sound. Now that I've really listened to it and examined the lyrics I've found that it is exactly what I should have been expecting at this point. The lyrics pursue and develop the same themes that have become so familiar since The Legend of Chin and the sound goes back to the raw, unfinished sound of that first album. It goes back to the goofy, playful, quirkiness of that first album that has been missing from the last two albums.

It's not my favourite Switchfoot album, but it has its merits and it can stand on its own. I'll give it 5/5 punk rocking materialists.