Second album review of the year. Really eager to listen to a few of these albums. I'm also incredibly excited to break in my new headphones which were my Christmas and birthday present from my wife. (Audio Technica ATH-M50's. Seriously good sounding headphones)
This album has been a long time coming. It's Five Iron's first new album in a decade. I still remember going to see these guys live on their farewell tour when I was 14. Seriously cool concert. Then they left and I was super bummed out. I had all of their albums and loved them to death (Even Cheeses of Nazareth...County Wisconsin).
Enter kickstarter. Five Iron crowd sources the full cost of their new album and then some. Pretty awesome. This album has had me really excited for a long time. Well... not excited enough to actually listen to it until over a month after it came out but you know I WAS BUSY, OKAY?!
Listening this album brings me back to 14 year old me listening to almost exclusively Ska music. This album, however, shows that the members of the band have grown up. The sound is a lot more mature than the music I listened to years and years ago (in terms of sound, not necessarily subject matter. This album isn't x-rated). There's still a lot of fun to be had here. Check out "Battle Dancing Unicorns with Glitter" for evidence of this group's goofiness. There's a lot of variety here, too. More upbeat music is next to slower more funk-driven works.
But the most important thing about this album is that you can tell that the group is having fun being back together. It shows up in a few albums I've heard in my life. A lot of music from The Barenaked Ladies has this energy. There's an attitude of "Yeah we would be doing this for free if we didn't need to eat occasionally" which is much more obvious than you might anticipate.
This album was a lot of fun to listen to and it's interesting to listen to music that you know a previous version of yourself would have stayed up all night to get in the pre iTunes store days. Worth a listen if you have the time. The whole album is on Spotify.
Check out their music video for the song "Zen and the Art of Xenophobia" if you want to live or whatever. I mean it's hard to argue with Abe Lincoln with Wolverine claws and a Jesus carrying a Tommy Gun.
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