There’s
a feeling that you get sometimes, very rarely, when you put on an album for the
first time and immediately feel warm and comfortable; like you’ve listened to
it before on a holiday somewhere, or a loved one gave it to you as a gift years
ago. This feeling of nostalgia for something you haven’t heard before rarely
extends for the duration of the album, either; so it is special when an entire
album becomes an immediate classic for the listener in their own, personal way.
Forget & Not Slow Down is one of
those rare albums for me, and continues to be one of my all time favourites,
maintaining the same immediacy and intimacy it held for me the first time I sat
down with the lyric booklet and heard it.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what it is
about Forget that makes it so
captivating for me – it always is in these cases – but one thing that has
remained the same is an immediately identifiable atmosphere of joy. And while
Relient K’s discography up until this stage in their career have all maintained
a sort of cheeky, care-free atmosphere, Forget
has always seemed to me to be Relient K’s most mature, introspective and
complete album; and as such is substantially more emotionally complex. Where
previously Relient K would make you laugh with a song almost entirely written
in gibberish (the aptly titled “Gibberish” from their Two Lefts… album), on Forget the
band is confronting “the ghosts of all the things that haunt me most” and
simply accepting and not slowing down. I guess the easiest way of describing it
is an understanding that the things we fear and loathe about ourselves are part
of what make us human, and they’re perfectly okay. There is a tinge of
melancholy shading the emotional landscape of the album, something not present
before in their music.
Musically, Forget was a departure for the band at the time; while Five Score & Seven Years Ago did
begin to move from the band’s pop punk roots, Forget is the first album of theirs to almost fully shed that
sound. Yes, there are still guitars and big sing-a-long anthems (“I Don’t Need
A Soul” and “If You Believe Me”), but like I mentioned earlier, a much more
mature sound inhabits the album. Piano takes a bigger role on the album, and
singer/main songwriter Matt Thiessen’s song writing is as good as it ever has
been in his career (“Deathbed”, the epic last track of Five Score hinted at this). The distorted guitar tones have a depth
and warmth that is not present in any of the band’s other material, and the mix
is lush and colourful.
When I stop to think about my favourite
tracks, I honestly have a hard time separating any as “better”. One of the
small problems I have with the album, however, is the interlude tracks. Some of
them work well, but I have never enjoyed the way “Savannah” is split into three
tracks. The intro track is fine, but I have never understood the outro track
“Baby”. It doesn’t feel like a necessary addition to “Savannah”, and at only 42
seconds it doesn’t stand by itself as a complete track. Having said this, it is
a small blemish that perhaps I am only seeing as a result of being pedantic.
For me the album ends on a huge high note,
after starting with three fantastic, single-worthy anthems and getting stuck
into the meat of the album. “If You Believe Me” is a serious contender for Best
Relient K Track, as well as having an awesome uncredited cameo by Underoath’s
Aaron Gillespie, and the final two tracks (another two part song) perfectly
capture what the album is saying in five minutes. Lyrically, I can count the
number of songs that have affected me in the same way on one hand.
I can’t tell you exactly why, but Forget & Not Slow Down impacted me
deeply as younger teenager, continues to impact me today, and I can’t help but
think that it has the potential and staying power to continue to do that for
others.
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