Nothing Is Sound - One Year Later

It's been one year since the release of the Switchfoot album Nothing Is Sound (NIS). In many eyes this album was considered a flop and not as good as the previous album The Beautiful Letdown (TBL). According to sales this would be true as NIS didn't even hit the 1 million mark while TBL was around 2.5 million. So I'll concede that NIS was a flop. There are many reasons including the infamous copy protection problem. I also wrote last year that they should have released other songs as singles. I don't know who makes those decisions but for some reason NIS was not meant to be a big hit and that's too bad. Frankly, it is Switchfoot's best effort. As Switchfoot has said in the past, "the song is king", and if that's the case then this is a remarkable collection of songs. The highlights are:

The Fatal Wound - Kind of a simpler song, it has the best lyrics I've ever heard. I've heard that it was written from the point of view of one of the thiefs on the cross. Live, it almost brought me to tears, but not played anymore.

Those are songs that are absolutely fantastic and I can't believe fans of the band didn't latch on to them as much as the songs from TBL. These are songs that should have been heard but haven't and probably won't be much anymore. Switchfoot even had a myspace contest for the songs they would play and none of the songs from NIS. It seems even the fans can't get past TBL and so it seems that Switchfoot has closed the NIS chapter and is moving on to "Oh! Gravity." (OG). For me, NIS was a great album and showed a ton of musical growth and I'm sure OG will be even better. I just hope that the problems that plagued NIS will not appear again. Heck, maybe folks will discover NIS and give it a chance.

Cross posted at Blog Critics

Posted by Tim at September 13, 2006 07:47 PM