Switchfoot -- The Beautiful Letdown

4/10

What can I say? Switchfoot's The Beautiful Letdown let me down. For a few years after P.O.D.'s 2001 barrier-smashing hit album, Satellite, broke through to the mainstream, I felt like every single decent Christian rock band was getting signed to a major label. Project 86 signed to Atlantic Records, just like P.O.D., for 2002's Truthless Heroes (but experienced the opposite of what P.O.D. did). Blindside signed to Elektra Records and released 2002's Silence (putting their music into thousands of ears who'd never heard it before). MxPx signed to A&M Records and released 2003's Before Everything & After (the less said about that one the better). The Juliana Theory even signed to Epic, releasing 2003's disappointing Love. Yes, I did not put my disappointment in parentheses there, as I'm going to make it explicit: most of these major label shifts created music that disappointed me--often poppier, more digestible, and far more shallow music than the work each band had done in the past.
These major label releases for Christian rock bands also rarely resulted in a groundswell of sales and recognition for the bands involved. P.O.D.'s 7x-platinum selling Satellite ended up being an outlier...along with Switchfoot's The Beautiful Letdown. The difference is, Satellite is actually a good record.
I don't mean to be...well, mean. At the time of The Beautiful Letdown's release, in the spring of 2003, I was legitimately surprised at how much I didn't like the album. I'd loved most of Switchfoot's previous work. With all of the acclaim, and the sudden fame and radio play The Beautiful Letdown brought to Switchfoot, I began to wonder, "Is it just me? Is The Beautiful Letdown actually a good album?"
Thankfully, I got some confirmation that it wasn't just expectation bias swaying my opinion: a couple of people who often insulted albums that I enjoyed pronounced that The Beautiful Letdown was a great album. When I heard them say that, I began to think that maybe more than unmet expectations were at play in my The Beautiful Letdown disappointment. Maybe it sucked. Listening to it 17 years later, I can confirm that my original feelings were more than correct. This album is not good.
The Beautiful Letdown kicks off with "Meant to Live," a huge-sounding, ponderous radio rock song. The call-and-response guitar intro felt generic to me in 2003, the chorus like something that would have been a pre-chorus on one of Switchfoot's previous albums. "We were meant to live for so much more/Have we lost ourselves?" frontman Jon Foreman yells out in lyrics I felt were over-the-top treacle. I can admit now, though, that "Meant to Live" is actually a pretty good song. I get why lyrics like "We want more than the wars of our fathers" from the song's bridge resonated so strongly one month before the U.S. invaded Iraq. "Meant to Live" is not necessarily the problem here.
The album continues with the more languid "This Is Your Life," which if the first song's chorus was treacle, this one's the last line before the commercial during an after-school special: "This is your life/are you who you want to be?" Again, though, the songwriting is fine, and the song's okay, a nice change of pace so early into the album.
The problems arise on track three, "More Than Fine," which, with its hand-clapping percussion and unhinged poppiness, is just downright lousy--it sounds like a CCM single. Perhaps the band recognized this, because they followed "More Than Fine" with the album's most aggressive song, "Ammunition." However, there's still a weird, silly poppiness underlying the song, and the production (throughout the entire album) robs Foreman's voice of that slight Fozzy Bear, frog-in-the-throat quality that made it so charming in the band's first three albums. Also, this is the moment in the album where it becomes clear the band are aiming this product at kids--Foreman makes so many easy rhymes, where before it seemed like...well, he was naming songs after philosophers, and exploring their ideas. The lyrics throughout The Beautiful Letdown feel extremely lowest-common-denominator.
The biggest insult to injury comes next, though. The fifth track is "Dare You to Move," taken from the band's previous album, career highlight Learning to Breathe. This feels like a theft, as The Beautiful Letdown doesn't deserve this song. It infuriated me at the time that so many people were first exposed to the spectacular "Dare You to Move" here, instead of where it was originally found. Now it just makes The Beautiful Letdown's lack of cohesion stand out all the more.
Next up, "Redemption" is straight up power-pop, and at this point I was and am missing the more complex instrumentation of the band's previous work. The title-track comes next, a weird, rambling semi-ballad that eventually invokes a choir of voices, but never quite coalesces into anything satisfying (the lyrics for the song actually sum up the nature of the album's literal title quite well, though).
The next song because I guess I am just going to talk about every track here, is "Gone," perhaps the worst the band had recorded up until this point. I don't know if they ever made worse than "Gone" because I bowed out after this album. "Gone" dumbs the music down to a nearly pre-school classroom level, with an absolutely awful bop-bop-a-doo-wop chorus and rapping bridge that almost feel like Foreman wrote them on a dare.
Following this travesty is "On Fire," the only song from The Beautiful Letdown I've been able to come back to. It's built on a wonderful electronic soundscape, with a leading piano line, an incredibly emotive vocal take by Foreman, lyrics that don't feel like a middle-school call-to-action, and music that actually feels like Switchfoot weren't just adding water to what they've done before. Perhaps the assistance of Neverending White Lights' Daniel Victor fueled "On Fire"'s creativity, but whatever the case, its the only song here I find satisfying.
Then "Adding to the Noise" goes back to the power-pop well, with an opening guitar-line I could teach my non-musician ten-year-old to play in five minutes. It's embarrassing that the band somehow gained two additional members, yet somehow sound smaller and less complex than ever before. At least Foreman gets a good line in--"If we're adding to the noise, then turn off this song." Okay.
The album ends with a big acoustic ballad of nothing, "Twenty-Four," which I think Foreman wrote about turning 24. It's the odd example of a song that gets both too personally specific, and yet too generic, making connection a near impossibility.
I had a plan to be nicely dismissive in this review, but I shouldn't have pushed my ears by giving the album yet another listen, while actively writing the review. Big mistake. I hate The Beautiful Letdown...17 years ago...now. Of all the Christian band jumping to a big label disappointments, The Beautiful Letdown might be the biggest. It's impressive that Foreman didn't sugarcoat his faith on the album, and considering Switchfoot's reputation for kindness, I'm glad they found success...but they've released seven albums since The Beautiful Letdown, and I haven't listened to one.


2003 Columbia/Sony BMG
1. Meant to Live 3:20
2. This Is Your Life 4:18
3. More Than Fine 4:14
4. Ammunition 3:45
5. Dare You to Move 4:09
6. Redemption 3:06
7. The Beautiful Letdown 5:21
8. Gone 3:45
9. On Fire 4:39
10. Adding to the Noise 2:50
11. Twenty-Four 4:52