It’s been four long years since we have been blessed with a new album by the Ohio rockers, Relient K, and with the new record, Collapsible Lung, perhaps the wait raised our expectations a little too high. Collapsible Lung is a solid pop-rock album, better than most things spewed out by record companies over the past five years or so, but at the same time, it’s not a solid record that we have come to expect from Matthew Thiessen and the boys.
The album opens with one of the better songs, “Don’t Blink”. With its solid instrumentals, as well as one of the best lyrics out there today, saying, “Love is beautiful and true, life is beautiful and new”, it holds up great. After that though, we get tracks like “Boomerang”, “Lost Boy”, “and “If I could Take You Home”, which for all intended purposes are very poppy.
Thankfully though, the second portion of the album starts out with a smooth track, “Can’t Complain”, which feels like an ode to Jack Johnson, as it is very chill. It also contains one of the best pop lyrics we have heard all year, “But I can’t complain, I can’t complain, every day is too short to let it go to waste, I can’t complain, you got to treat every day like a holiday”.
After that though, it is followed up by flat and average tracks like, “Gloria”, “PTL”, and “Disaster”, which is disheartening. Thankfully though, the album finishes with three somewhat strong and smooth tracks, both lyrically and instrumentally with “When You Were My Baby”, “Sweeter”, and “Collapsible Lung”.
All in all, this was a OK album, much better than what we have seen come out of the pop and rock scene lately. But in terms of what we have come to expect from Relient K, it seems to fail expectations that we have put up around them the past four years. Thankfully though, they have given us many albums to rely on that are better than this one.