How to go
Who: Relient K
Where: Bogart’s, 2621 Vine St., Cincinnati
When: 6:30 p.m. Friday
Cost: $26.77
More info: 513-872-8801 or www.bogarts.com
When Christian rock band Relient K released its seventh album, “Collapsible Lung,” last July, many fans weren’t happy. The complaints were varied. Some said it didn’t sound like Relient K. Others lamented that there were insufficient references to God or that some of the songs seemed to celebrate acts that true Christians wouldn’t do, such as taking a strange girl home.
The short explanation for the sonic and lyrical deviations on “Collapsible Lung” is that the band, unprecedentedly, brought in multiple songwriters to collaborate, including Sugarcult’s Tim Pagnotta and Bruno Mars producer Ari Levine. The result is an album that sounds extremely poppy, with lots of synth and fake drums and only a few of the straight-ahead rock/pop punk songs that typically characterize the band’s sound.
“We really wanted to throw ourselves a curveball, push ourselves,” said lead guitarist Matt Hoopes, who founded the band in the late 1990s with lead vocalist, Matt Thiessen, and ex-bassist, Brian Pittman, in their hometown of Canton. “We didn’t just want to make another record, doing what we already know to do. It hasn’t been a success for a lot of our fans. But we felt like it was a record that we had to make, and I’m glad we made it.”
Ironically, in some cases, Relient K and their fan base did eventually come to see eye to eye on “Collapsible Lung,” though they took different routes to get there. For one, Hoopes admitted his favorite songs on the album were the two that sounded the most Relient K-like. Secondly, a prevailing theory among the more open-minded fans as they slowly digested “Collapsible Lung” was that it was a concept album, wherein the hero momentarily loses his path but gets right with God in the end.
“We didn’t intend that, but that’s what it sort of became,” Hoopes said. “A lot of the record is empty, lyrically, and our favorite songs are the two Matt and I wrote, because we have more of a personal attachment to them.”
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