New Found Glory - Coming Home

How’s this for journalistic integrity and being unbiased? As much as I dread writing about music that I don’t give one iota of shit about, I’m taking Coming Home and reviewing it from an entirely personal perspective. Having a stance on an album before even hearing leads to disastrous and poor criticisms, and my take on the latest New Found Glory record, before even knowing about its existence, would fall somewhere along the lines of “I’m not 17 anymore.”

Autobiographical elements inserted here: As a youth in a tiny rural town, anything that wasn’t Creed, Korn or Kenny Chesney was an alternative music choice, hence the amount of time that I spent infatuated with The Ataris, Blink 182, The Movielife, and the subject at hand—New Found Glory. Burgeoning on adulthood is a time where you can relate to these songs about heartbreak; when you’re a few years older, you can’t help but notice how un-artistic and immature those songs actually were.

New Found Glory is a band I associate with my own adolescence; they covered “Glory of Love”, didn’t they? As a Karate Kid disciple, you can’t help but love ‘em for that. Opening a track with an audio sample from The Outsiders, it’s total ‘80s nostalgia. Unfortunately, it doesn’t maintain its effect beyond adolescence, and nine years into its existence, New Found Glory is taking its sweet-ass time traveling down the road of maturation.

That said, Coming Home boasts the strongest songwriting of any New Found Glory release. “Hold My Hand” is the disc’s most radio-ready, its solo piano notes accompanying Jordan Pundik’s still-nasally singing; the handclap breakdown is a welcomed nuance and Pundik’s echoed “do-dos” are wholly reminiscent of ‘80s pop, and the title track’s chorus has the same effect. The majority of the record—the whole record, in fact—never strays from accessibility and engaging melody, and while the songs don’t home as simplistic structures as the band’s previous work, the band’s mission-objective is the same as all the groups creating similar music—keep it catchy. Except, the members of New Found Glory are raising families and are far-removed from the high school drama in which most of the band’s fans dwell. Musically, there’s more exploration on the record, but it only roams from one corner of a box to another. The puerile lyrical approaches are the most appalling facet of the disc, often as though taken from the love-letters of any enamored young man.

On a lighter note, if substance isn’t requisite to your listening fancies, then Coming Home delivers. Where New Found Glory fails in prose, it flaunts a learned expertise in the school of melody. Coming Home is a tiresome portrait of a few artists who have kept the minds of young men for far, far too long. [www.newfoundglory.com]