After Edmund

It’s not unusual to read reviews that characterize a band’s current work as their most mature - as the logical step in a musical progression from competence and safety to a more creative, adventurous place. What is unusual is to find that same progress made during the course of a single album, but although After Edmund’s Hello starts out in very familiar CCM/rock territory it ends up sounding like a band that’s already stretching its creative wings.

Certainly, the first five tracks on Hello are better than the average CCM fare and more than ready for Christian rock radio, but they still lack a defining sound to lift them out from the rest of the pack. It’s not until track six that the five members of After Edmund show us that they have more to offer than the average post-Switchfoot indie/alt/modern pop/rock band. “Come and Rain Down,” starts out innocently enough as a passionate, confessional mid-tempo song about our need to rely on God’s strength, but turns a musical corner towards the end and becomes an anthemic epic featuring a strong hook pushed by powerful drumming and a thick wall of sound.

Directly on the heels of this dramatic anthem comes the very crisp, stark treatment of “Tears,” a song that starts out with patches of electronic sound, joined by staccato drums and bright, short guitar chords and Mitch Parks’ 80s-style vocals. The song is an appropriately rocking contrast to the ‘bigness’ of the preceding track, and shows that After Edmund is a band that is capable of more than just one or two tricks. The tempo slows down on the next track, “Stealing Away,” which not only shows the band as solid commercial song writers, but delivers a solid ‘Tait-like’ ballad featuring some good, understated piano work, slide guitar, and powerful drumming.

Distant church bells fade off the end of “Stealing Away,” and lead us into a pair of tracks that are, for me, what puts this project over the top: the etude-like “Go Oboe,” and the project’s show-piece, “Clouds.” Both songs are connected by the ‘Hello, hello,” vocal riff, which is sung in a way that can’t help but summon aural ghosts of The Beatles. “Go Oboe,” with its tranquil piano and string quartet becoming ominously frenzied at the end, becomes the prelude to the heavily punctuated guitar/orchestra riff that starts “Clouds” in a Beatles/ELO/Queen mode. Here, the band steps outside the box and delivers an interesting piece of music that successfully incorporates classic rock with modern. The song ends with a very George Martin-inspired string quartet coda just before the band launches back into worshipful rock with “It’s Alright.” The album’s closer, “To See You Leave,” begins with an organ repeating the closing chords of the previous track, but substitutes an acoustic guitar for the electric and goes into a more mellow direction, especially on the dreamy bridge.

Parks, who also plays guitar, is a good singer and he handles the falsetto parts well, although I’d like to hear him develop a stronger personal style (he still sounds a bit generic). Keyboards and backing vocals are well-handled by Yates, while Matt McFaddon and Adam Stanley play bass (“the most glorious instrument in the world”) and drums, respectively. Playing guitar (and helping on background vocals along with the rest of the band members) is Ben Hosey. The ambitiousness and creativity of the last six tracks on Hello make this project one that you might want to seek out.

If this is “hello,” then I say, “come back soon.”

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