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Album Review: Five Iron Frenzy, “Engine of a Million Plots”

Five Iron Frenzy. The band’s name honors a golf club swinging paranoiac. Its albums have names like All the Hype That Money Can Buy, It’s Funny but Not Very Creative, and Our Newest Album Ever! (exclamation point not mine). A few of its songs quote literary figures like Edgar Allen Poe and Shakespeare, while others feature imaginary scenarios with dancing glittery unicorns or hungry wizards.

And it’s a Christian band. Earnestly, realistically Christian.

If this description intrigues you, stop reading and go listen to Five Iron Frenzy’s new album, Engine of a Million Plots. If the description has confused, alarmed, or disgusted you, then please keep reading.

Five Iron Frenzy is a ska-core band, meaning they combine the reggae-like rhythms and prominent horn sections of ska with the fast, intense, and sometimes abrasive sounds of hardcore punk rock. The band formed in 1995, released nine albums between then and 2004, and after a nine year gap released a tenth album in November of this year. The latest album, Engine of a Million Plots, features twelve of the band’s characteristically weird, spirited, and astute reflections on life. The music—with its strong beat, catchy melodies, exuberant horn playing, and hint of melancholy—is fantastic. However, the album’s greatest strength is in the lyrics to its songs.

That is, once they make sense. Listening casually, I found the meaning of these songs difficult to grasp. This is partly because the words can blend into the music and partly because the words often seem nonsensical. The snippets “we are professors at robot spy college,” or “I fight tsunamis with an umbrella” for example, don’t convey much. However, reading the full lyrics revealed commentary on despair, arrogance, lost faith, and tightly held hope. The album presents a complex picture of Christianity—alternately joking bitterly about its failures, regretting times when it is lost, and triumphing in the confidence it offers.

Courtesy of relevantmagazine.com
Courtesy of relevantmagazine.com

The song “Zen and the Art of Xenophobia,” for example, mocks the hypocrisy and disdain of so-called Christians. With biting sarcasm, the lyrics say to “cling to your god and guns,” and to “lock and load—just like Jesus did.” The line “give me liberty…or something” highlights the loss of ideals, while the suggestion to “turn your wine back into water” evokes the self-righteous Pharisees’ rejection of Jesus’s miracles. The final words, “and Jesus was American,” are a sharp rebuke for a false sense of superiority.

With an entirely different tone, the song “Blizzards and Bygones” reflects on the loss of a once vibrant faith. The song is resigned in attitude, with lyrics like “you look around but find yourself all alone, and you hunker down, but the cold’s already in your bones.” However, the portrayal of faith is beautiful and loving. The song contrasts the time “back when the angels of heaven would sing” with a time of “frost and no thaw,” and describes “a flicker of desire…a faintly glowing fire for some truth” that remains even when faith is gone.

Of all the songs on the album, “I’ve Seen the Sun” caught me most unaware with the power of its lyrics. The details are vivid and chaotic—“I’m facing down death like a fly on the windscreen. You bring the Warheads, I’m bringing ice cream” or “I’m screaming down into the black abyss…bells are ringing.” But they bring to life the central lines, “I’ve seen the sun come down…And in the dark of night I hold to its return.” This radical hope appears again in the words “tell me that I’m doomed and I’ll keep singing. The fight won’t end with me.” Then, in the last line, the song boldly celebrates the source of such hope: “Savior says…everything’s gonna be alright.”

Five Iron Frenzy’s new album is simultaneously profound and playful, depressed and confident, accusing and joyful. A brief description should have made obvious that the band doesn’t take itself too seriously. Arguably because of this, Engine of a Million Plots offers a thought-provoking look at the real brokenness surrounding Christianity and the real salvation we find in Jesus Christ.