Utter Dissapointment

     Well, my excitement was crushed.  I hate to hate on this album and it pains me to talk badly about Switchfoot, but I have been waiting for this for the entire year.  I've been a big fan and follower of this band for years and own all of their albums, even their early stuff from the 90s.  Ironically I just stated a couple of weeks ago that no matter what, this would be the one band that I would always love and spend money on.  Boy, did I jinx myself. 
     Vice Versas came out last Tuesday and as soon as it did, I tried to purchase it on iTunes.  Thank God, I realized soon enough that I was out of iTunes credit and decided just to listen to it on Spotify instead.  WTH?! was all I could say.  What happened to Switchfoot?!
     This album is full of cliches.  From the lyrics, to the arrangements of the songs, everything was so contrived and pathetic.  I was shocked at how the lyrics, what I usually respect the most about Switchfoot, sounded as though they could have been written by amateurs.  Like seriously, did a couple of twelve year olds write this stuff?  You'll find that when you look at the title of the songs, you can already predict what it will sound like.  Literally almost every chorus just repeats the title.  Ugh!  Not what I would expect from front-man, and my personal hero, Jon Foreman.  Switchfoot, Foreman's other band Fiction Family, and his solo project are usually filled with artistic and authentic lyrics about life and spirituality.  But none of that is heard on Vice Versas.
      So what happened this time?  Well I blame Atlantic Records and their producers, that Switchfoot is new to working with.  Everything sounds like its trying to be catchy, instead of original.  Another problem is that a lot of this sounds like some of Switchfoot's past work, as though they just ran out of ideas and decided to compile similar sounding stuff as before, but not in a good way.  
       I will admit that the album isn't completely terrible; it does strike some good notes, and it could have had potential, but then never got to actual good.  What I don't understand is all the buzz about this album.  It has received so much more promotion than previous Switchfoot music, more than other albums which I thought deserved to be talked about more.  Fans as well as the band themselves have said that this is their best work yet, and I completely disagree.  This is by far the most disappointed I've been all year.  Hopefully, maybe if I listen to this album again, it will grow on me, but I doubt it.  And I would advise fans of this album, or people who don't know much about Switchfoot to check out their older stuff and then decide if this is really good work.

Vocals: 7.5
Album: 3