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New Release: Anberlin “Vital”
Anberlin is a band whose music has always sounded disjointed to me. Not the individual songs, but their albums taken as a whole. This is a band that has two different impulses when it comes to their sound: on the one hand, they are a band born out of punk, heavy metal, and hardcore. On the other hand, there is strong strain of balladering in their music–soft, melodic songs that are more aligned with emo or even pop. Previous albums, like 2010′s Dark Is The Way, Light Is The Place, have swung wildly between these two different musical ethos.
Now, I’m not saying that these swings between sounds are a bad thing. In fact, I would argue that the willingness of this band to bring together the disparate aspects of what is essentially the same genre–pop-punk–is the very thing that has earned them so many fans. What Anberlin’s musical disjointedness reveals is something similar to what grunge exposed 20 years–that rage and angst are two sides of the same coin. So why not make an album that reflects that? Why not make an album that slides violently between these differing emotional experiences? The real innovation (if I may be so bold as to use that word) isn’t that Anberlin juxtaposes these two emotions, but that they choose not to do it in the same song. Instead, they do it over the course of the album.
Claims circulating on the internet describe Anberlin’s newest effort, Vital, as “heavier” than prior ventures. But this isn’t precisely true. It isn’t that Vital displays a grittier, harder sound than before. Rather, it is the sound on the album feels more like a cohesive whole. The abrupt changes between genres that characterized and defined Anberlin’s sound have lost their blunt transitional edges. What Vital does is this: it takes the musical spectrum present that’s always been there in Anberlin’s sound and blends them together. You hear, far more definitively, the connection between the emo, the ballad, the hardcore, and the guttural. In short, the songs on this album sound like they belong together, even if that unity is a little surprising.
Now, I’m not a fan-girl. This isn’t an album that speaks to me. Listening to it was a perfectly pleasant experience, if a forgettable one. But though I do not recall anything particular about any of the individual songs, I do appreciate the overall arc of the music. What stood out to me more than any single song was precisely what I’ve just mentioned: the cluster of many different kinds of indie music genres on one LP. In some ways, listening to this album is like listening to the soundtrack of a film. It seems to trace a story in which the main character goes from the brutal to the harmonious. And I do like an album that tries to say something. That alone ought to make you give Vital a thorough listening to.