Five Iron Frenzy: The End is Near (2004)

A while back, I reviewed Brave Saint Saturn’s trilogy of albums, but I’ve never written about Five Iron Frenzy, the band from which Brave Saint Saturn was a spin-off.  Though massively different in both style and sensibility, I love Five Iron Frenzy pretty much equally for altogether different reason.  During their nine years together, the Christian ska/rock group made a lot of great music, but for my maiden post on their stuff, I’m writing about their final release.  (‘Cause I’m sensical like that.)

It really makes a difference that Five Iron created this album knowing that they were disbanding.  It’s not just the last there is – it’s a farewell, and notes of that farewell echo through the entire record.  Some songs are explicitly about the demise of the band.  “It was Beautiful” looks back on memories of the opportunities they had together and everything they saw/did while touring.  “See the Flames Begin to Crawl” essentially throws a Viking funeral for the band, offering up images of smashed guitars and drum kits before setting it all ablaze; although the fans “demand [their] survival,” the song rhapsodizes them as the ones to carry on the legacy.  And “That’s How the Story Ends” spins every crazy, goofy ditty Five Iron ever concocted into a Poe-esque tale charged with finality and tongue-in-cheek melodrama.

While these songs all provide overt references to the End in the album’s name, the death of Five Iron peeks through in other, subtler ways.  The opening track, “Cannonball,” is almost funereal in its recklessness.  In the song, the speaker – who describes himself as the titular cannonball – knows he’s plummeting to the earth and won’t survive, but he’s accepts it calmly as “what [he] was made for.”  And if we look to the other bookend, “On Distant Shores” ends the album on a further contemplation of mortality.  The chorus of course seems to allude to Heaven, pledging to meet God “on distant shores,” and the song also samples Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,” one of the most blatant death poems ever, or at least among those not written by Emily Dickinson.  (Incidentally, Thomas wrote the poem, not about impending death, but impending blindness.  The literary world has spoken, however, and since any published work no longer belongs solely to the author, society at large has made their own ideas about the poem’s meaning.)  Yet, like the songs I discussed in the previous paragraph, “On Distant Shores” doesn’t only look ahead to the end; it also looks back, ending in an impassioned reprise of the last stanza of “Every New Day,” one of Five Iron’s best-regarded songs.

And okay, can we just take a second to talk about “On Distant Shores”?  It’s not so much a song as an experience.  It builds like an 11 o’clock number in a musical – starting slowly, building itself to a fever pitch, and ending in an outpouring of melodic ecstasy.  The bridge is especially stunning.  It takes front man Reese Roper to such a place of brokenness, acknowledging all his failings and unworthiness through Five Iron’s usual unflinching honesty.  If I had to pick a single lyric from the entire album, it’d be, “When grace was easy to admit, / I’d denounce the hypocrites - / Casting first stones, killing my own.”  It’s not often that you see Christian musicians so thoroughly exploring their own transgressions, which makes the song all the more powerful when it comes around to the ultimate theme:  that God loves beyond all reason, beyond what anyone deserves, beyond what anyone believes can possibly be true.  In the midst of sin, shortcomings, and self-loathing, the love continues, and it’s that love that Five Iron Frenzy captures better than most Christian music I’ve heard.