Plumbiferous Media

Ace Enders and a Mil­lion Dif­fer­ent Peo­ple isn’t Enders’s first musi­cal ini­tia­tive. Instead, it’s his first solo side project fol­low­ing the hia­tus of The Early Novem­ber, with whom he released 2 albums, includ­ing the con­cept album “The Mother, the Mechanic, and the Path.” Along with the “mil­lion dif­fer­ent peo­ple” indi­cated by the group name, on Enders’s new album, he relies upon his exper­tise from his ear­lier projects to cre­ate a solid (if some­what indis­tin­guish­able) new entry into the vast canyon that is rock music.

From the point when Enders’s vocals come in on “Rein­tro­duc­tion,” bemoan­ing his pres­ence as “a ghost,” the nature of When I Hit the Ground becomes entirely clear. How­ever, while Enders’s lyrics are based upon the well-trodden rock ter­ri­tory of self-deprecation, the indul­gent past, and emo­tional dis­tress, his dynamic voice keeps the music dif­fer­ent from every other track com­posed this way. Enders relies on the same radio-friendly meth­ods of com­po­si­tion which have served him so well with his ear­lier work, and it’s espe­cially vis­i­ble in his effort­less com­bi­na­tion of ele­ments from soft and hard rock. But as top-ten bound as Enders’s music seems, he’s also man­aged to keep When I Hit the Ground from becom­ing entirely generic.

While Enders’s lyrics are based on the same sorts of sub­jects as most other pop-rock, Enders uses his sub­jects well. When Enders sings “And some­times all you need in life is emergency/To take time and fig­ure out what you’re doing here” on the con­tem­pla­tive “Emer­gency,” it becomes clear that the lyrics on When I Hit the Ground are deeper than might be expected on such an album. How­ever, it is also true that on tracks such as the slightly Lennon-reminiscent “Bring Back Love,” the lyri­cal qual­ity is sub­stan­tially lower. Nev­er­the­less, When I Hit the Ground is com­posed of enough well-written (if some­what generic) lyrics to excuse the occa­sion­ally mediocre writing.

Over­all, the instru­men­tals on When I Hit the Ground are solid. The musi­cians are clearly com­pe­tent, as there are, track by track, no obvi­ous musi­cal flaws. Over­all, the album could use some more musi­cal diver­sity, but it by no means only has one sound. In addi­tion, spe­cial praise must go to the mix­ers, who did an amaz­ing job keep­ing every­thing in check, includ­ing the omnipresent, but not over­whelm­ing, excel­lent drumming.

The album only begins to fall apart in the mesh­ing between the vocals and instru­men­tals, which often run counter to each other: Enders will reach a cli­max, then the instru­men­tals, then Enders, and the instru­men­tals again. The end result is that instead of either part car­ry­ing the other, the entire album starts to sub­tract from itself. This is most appar­ent on the first track, in which at the loud­est, hoars­est point for Ender, the instru­men­tals have yet to even fully appear, and “Rein­tro­duc­tion” ends up sound­ing as if it were pieced together, rather than act­ing as a cohe­sive unit. Because of this prob­lem, one of the most suc­cess­ful tracks on the album is actu­ally the interlude-esque “Emer­gency,” sim­ply because the gui­tar actu­ally com­ple­ments the voice.

When I Hit the Ground is not a bad album, but it is hard to for­give it for main­tain­ing every­thing bad that is asso­ci­ated with the term “MTV Rock”: clean, but dense and indul­gent instru­men­tals, a lack of direc­tion, even when the music is tech­ni­cally flaw­less, and the occa­sional use of odd fil­ters over the voice, when it sounds per­fectly decent with­out. Indeed, When I Hit the Ground is dif­fi­cult to review, not because it is hard to describe - it isn’t - but because when lis­ten­ing, you often come across the sud­den real­iza­tion that you have no idea what you were just lis­ten­ing to for the past five or ten min­utes and are forced to re-listen to the pre­vi­ous few tracks, only to encounter the same prob­lem again. There is some­thing to be said for a dense, often upbeat, stadium-like rock album that some­how man­ages to be soporific, but that some­thing cer­tainly isn’t praise.

This post is tagged 50-59, Ace Enders and a Million Other People