Relient K – mmhmm

To date, Relient K has sold over a million albums with their first three releases, and their latest, Two Lefts Don’t Make A Right… But Three Do, is approaching Gold status after having shipped over 430,000 albums to date. They’ve been nominated for a Grammy and a Billboard Music Video Award and really have no where to go but up. Now, Relient K are back with their fourth studio album, mmhmm; and with this album, the Canton, OH natives hope to go up.

Like their last release, mmhmm is hard to review. Relient K have crafted fourteen punk oriented song dipped in a layer of pop to soften out the edges. They have some hard hitting, fast paced songs like The Only Thing Worse Than Beating A Dead Horse Is Betting On One and Who I Am Hates Who I’ve Been. They have some amazing pop-rock songs like Which To Bury, Us Or The Hatchet and I So Hate Consequences along with some soft, piano driven tunes like Let It All Out. Each one of the genres or styles have their own positive and negative aspects, creating a diverse album with a very pop-punk feel to it with strong resemblances to The Starting Line.

The best parts of the album are definitely the faster ones. When they try to slow it down, sing more melodic and high pitch, it tends to lose the power of the song and even gets boring sometimes. Take Be My Escape for example. It starts off with an amazing melody and vocal harmony which grabs you. But when vocalist Matthew Thiessen reaches for that high pitch mark on the “Iiiiiii gotta get out of here”, it hurts the song. Its annoying. The song is still really good, but would be so much better without the high pitch whine.

Despite the weird name and slightly boring artwork, mmhmm is a nice pop-punk album. It does get a bit boring and repetitive at times, but like Two Lefts…, this album also has a few gems on it.