Album Review: Four Year Strong "Explains It All"

I thought the combination of a band I merely liked and a cover album would be disastrous, but when I heard Four Year Strong’s Explains It All I was happily surprised! When my eyes rolled through the track list I smirked a little remembering all of the songs from growing up in the 90’s and spotting a couple from some of my favorite bands (No Doubt and Third Eye Blind). Maybe they are just following in the foot steps of another band almost in the same genre as them who like to cover 90’s hits that you would not associate them with (cough cough, New Found Glory).

Somehow, somewhere God (or whoever or whatever you believe in) shined upon this album and made it work. I would even say better than “work”. My personal opinion on Four Year Strong is that all of their songs sound the same. I like and can sing along with a couple of them but there are only so many variations of “Bada Bing! With A Pipe” my ears can withstand before my A.D.D. kicks in and I change to another artist. I wish you readers could have seen my face as I listened to the album. Seriously, my mouth was ajar the whole time. I was so taken aback that a band managed to stay true to the original songs but also make them their own. Often times, covers fall short of the original because you can not top the artist’s first intentions; obviously there was something that worked the first time around.

You have to chuckle to yourself a little bit when you see Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic”. I love that Four Year Strong had the balls to only change the song’s original lyrics a tad from “It’s meeting the man of my dreams and then meeting his beautiful wife” replacing “my” to “your”.

As hard as I am to please when some band is covering a Third Eye Blind song (BEDlight For Blue Eyes’s cover of “Jumper” on Punk Rock Goes 90’s is a perfect example of how horrible a TEB cover can be) Four Year Strong made the song explosive. They seem to have left out a verse, I’m sure it was intentionally, but as I was singing along I had to go back and listen to original to make sure I wasn’t going crazier than I already am.

I was blown away to find Travis McCoy from Gym Class Heroes featured on the song “Fly”. That definitely won brownie points in my book. Though McCoy’s “talking” throughout the song does not really do much.

I highly recommend you giving this cover Album a try. It is nice to see bands not taking themselves to seriously anymore. I think if you were a fan before Explains It All you’ll appreciate the humor more. Yeah, it’s kind of a joke, but we’re all here laughing right along with Four Year Strong.