Dryvetyme Onlyne

Hawk Nelson
Hawk Nelson Is My Friend
Tooth & Nail Records; 2008

Update! This review can be found at Burnside Writers Collective!

I’ll be honest here: it’s a bit too easy to make fun of Tooth & Nail Records these days. They’ve spent most of the ’00s relentlessly straddling the line between being accepted by both the Warped Tour and youth pastors. And while that’s a noted accomplishment to be sure, they have settled upon a rather comfortable formula for how they attract and market the bands on their roster. I’m going to play the old guy card here — the “I remember when back in the old days” card — and talk to you about the Tooth & Nail that I grew up with. This was a label that contained all manner of styles and sounds, refused to pander to Christian radio stations and magazines, and distributed to stores via small shipping companies (as opposed to their current EMI deal).

Bands like Frodus, Havalina, Blenderhead, Roadside Monument, Puller, and Living Sacrifice released albums to adoring, albeit small, fanbases. This was the label that launched the careers of national touring acts like MxPx, Zao, Mae, The Juliana Theory, and Underoath, while diligently cultivating the music of Starflyer 59 and Joy Electric. But it seems that all of that has changed within the past 5 or so years, in that, T&N is content to be a version of Vagrant Records or Drive Thru Records that kids don’t have to hide from Mom and Dad. “But these guys are Christians!” kids can proclaim, and then display album lyrics to said parents in order to gain approval for their music. All this from the label that originally never really worried about whether or not their music satisfied the “Jesus-Per-Minute Quotient.” The edge is gone, or it’s a bit manufactured to appear like edge. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not necessarily bemoaning the loss of innocence or anything like that, but I am sad that what once was will never be again.

So, when I hear the music of Hawk Nelson on their new album Hawk Nelson Is My Friend, I get a little bit misty-eyed with lament, mostly because nothing really sticks in my musical craw. The songs all tend to sound the same — the tempo, meter, rhythm, and subject matter tend to vary little across the 12 tracks — and they lack a definitive identity. These Canadian boys are yet another link in the T&N chain: another band of fresh-faced guys in their early 20′s who play music that’s easily accessible and is comprised of non-offensive pop, punk, emo, and rock riffs. Is there anything really wrong with those sounds? Not necessarily, but there’s certainly nothing distinctive about the bands that produce such sounds.

Admittedly, these are fun, catchy, upbeat songs, filled with energy and lyrics that are easy to sing with a crowd, the hallmarks of the pop-punk style. Selections like “You Have What I Need” and “Ancient History” easily stand out as the strongest tracks because they have the most substance and swagger. The album then dips a bit before hitting a plateau songs like “Friend Like That,” a plaintive cry for real friendship (how non-punk is that?!?), “Turn It On,” a call for musicians to write songs that can get listeners moving (though this song isn’t one of them), or “Just Like Me,” the thematic flipside to “Friend Like That,” complete with an appeal for everyone to reconcile relationships that have gone sour. Where the album really falls apart is when the band attempts to grow up and display a more sensitive side by writing some heart-felt ballads. From “One Little Miracle” and its plea for everyone to work together to help fix the world to “Somebody Else,” where the singer agonizes over the fact that his friends have noticed that he’s not the same person he used to be and that they want him to change his ways, the songs come across as tired attempts to garner some Christian radio airplay.

And that’s the problem with Hawk Nelson Is My Friend in its entirety. It’s not that these aren’t beautiful themes that aren’t worth singing about, but other poets and songwriters in times past have expressed such thoughts with more lyrical poignancy and melodic depth than Hawk Nelson is able to convey. It is admirable that the band eschews the standard “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy must sing about his pain” emo-pop fare by choosing to sing about the complexities of relationships amongst friends. But, in typical contemporary Tooth & Nail fashion, the record sounds safe — safe sounds, safe songs, safe band — and safety was, is, and always will by musically unattractive.