Canter Bridge

It may well be that Lifehouse fired their three working bullets on the first tracks of this eponymous and excellent album.

Then again, maybe not. The rest of these tunes are pretty good work. It’s just a little tough keeping up with the right-left-another-right emotional impact of ‘Come Back Down’, ‘You and Me’, and ‘Blind’. Lifehouse could pull a Simon & Garfunkel and disappear after this album and we’d still warm to these first three exquisite and pathos-filled songs twenty years hence. We’d remember who we were when we first heard them.

That’s good music-making.

It is no small thing to turn melancholy into music in just this way, then to evade the speeding bullet of melodrama by finding the thin thread of hope that runs through the slice of life that Lifehouse chronicles for us here. ‘Come Back Down’ narrates the promise to be there for a self-destructive lover. This is the expression of a settled life, one that has come to term with the ebbs and flows of life that leave one high or, at times, just dry. There is no exaggeration in it, no overstated drama. No panic, no overt neediness. Just a slightly cool, steadily warm-hearted, open-eyed assessment of how things are:

I hope that you can find your way back
To the place where you belong

When you come back down
If you land on your feet
I hope you find a way to make it back to me
When you come around
I’ll be there for you
Don’t have to be alone with what you’re going through

You’re coming back down
You say you feel lost can I help you find it
When you come around
From time to time we all are blinded
You’re coming back down
You don’t have to tell me what you’re feeling
I know what you’re going through
I won’t be the one that lets go of you

Most of us will never know a love like that, though we can glimpse it when the tale is sung to us with this breed of poignance.

Yet the smooth, easily-digested sound of Lifehouse is also capable of carrying the story of a man who’s become quite smitten. The second track of the album’s blockbuster opening tells the story. If the b-word sounds overheated, listen to tracks 1-3 a handful of times in a row and tell me it doesn’t announce a rite du passage of a now grown-up band:

There’s something about you now
I can’t quite figure out
Everything she does is beautiful
Everything she does is right

‘Cause it’s you and me and all of the people with nothing to do
Nothing to lose
And it’s you and me and all other people
And I don’t know why, I can’t keep my eyes off of you
and me and all other people with nothing to do
Nothing to prove
And it’s you and me and all other people
And I don’t know why, I can’t keep my eyes off of you

What day is it?
And in what month?
This clock never seemed so alive

This is Sting-quality love-song writing, a cruising at altitude that one might find once or twice in a strong band’s best album. That Lifehouse should prove capable of turning the diamond slowly in good light, setting facet after facet of their craft before us without blemish, is almost astonishing. Turning again to the wonder that is tracks 1-3, one finds them capable even of exquisite anguish. ‘Blind’ is the song that does it:

After all this time
I never thought we’d be here
Never thought we’d be here
When my love for you was blind
But I couldn’t make you see it
Couldn’t make you see it
That I loved you more than you’ll ever know
A part of me died when I let you go

After all this why
Would you ever wanna leave it
Maybe you could not believe it
That my love for you was blind
But I couldn’t make you see it
Couldn’t make you see it
That I loved you more than you will ever know
A part of me died when I let you go
That I loved you more than you’ll ever know
A part of me died when I let you go

The band can be forgiven if some of the tracks that follow suffer a benign mediocrity. They’ve proven a point. Coasting is a venal rather than a mortal sin when the artistry that gets us there is so fine.

Lifehouse‘s sound is gentle-thoughtful rock. Some reviewers have detected a certain sameness to their music. I find enough variation to hold my interest, though within the limits of a well-defined genre.

There’s some great listening here, most of it front-loaded as a great introduction to a good album.