Lloyd

Item: Thoughts From a Driveway
Author: Bert Gangl

Thoughts From a Driveway

(1998)

Reviewed by Bert Gangl

Discogs YouTube

Label Organic RecordsThe LighthouseUnsorted 1998

alternative rock post-grunge power pop rock

Houston band Imagine This caused a sizable stir in the world of Christian rock music with their 1994 self-titled debut album. The well-executed funk-rock sound of that release catapulted the group squarely onto the Christian rock charts. The group's second album, Love, rode the same funk groove of the first album while peppering many of the faster songs with a quasi-disco sound, and a good number of the slower ones with an acoustic guitar-based texture. After the second album, bassist Ahmed Montgomery and keyboard player Tambri Hunt departed the band, and the three remaining members changed the group's name to Lloyd.

Despite the fact that the majority of the members of Imagine This made their way into the new band, the new musical and lyrical approach on Thoughts From A Driveway make it a bona fide debut for the new group Lloyd, and not just a third album for Imagine This under a different name. Songwriter Daryl Youngblood, the creative force behind both bands, has opted to trade the swaggering funk of the first two albums for alternative and pop sensibilities on the third release. Whereas a great number of the songs on Imagine This and Love used a heavily syncopated beat and were built around a single, much-repeated guitar riff, the songs on Driveway tend to be more buoyant numbers constructed on simple, yet catchy, chord progressions as opposed to a single pattern of notes. And the hard rock/heavy metal guitar texture that pervaded the first two releases has been traded for a more melodic approach using either a classic power pop sound, complete with ringing, jangly guitars on songs like "Mary Tyler Moore," or a post-grunge tack like that on "Don't Wanna Know" or "Listening For Whispers," where clean, subdued guitar on the verses gives way to a distorted, sludgy guitar sound on the choruses.

The new release also relies on a much simpler vocal approach than the first two albums. A great number of tracks on the first two releases used heavily layered backing vocals and oftentimes multiple lead vocals to give the songs a nearly anthemic effect. But Driveway uses virtually no backing vocals on the verses, and only greatly muted backing vocals on the choruses, giving the songs a more sparse texture that is characteristic of much of modern rock music. Lyrically, the album is both similar and different to the first two efforts. Youngblood does deal, once again, with unmistakably Biblical themes such as trust ("Don't Wanna Know"), faith and dying ("Forever Song") and man's inability to fully comprehend God ("Human"). But, where the songs on the debut album and Love were mostly unwavering statements of hard and fast truths, the songs on Driveway are more often introspective, inviting the listener to ponder open-ended questions rather than respond to bold exhortations.

The new album is by no means perfect, but its flaws are few and brief, most times relating more to the listener's musical preference than to any lack on the part of the band. To be sure, Daryl Youngblood and company have created yet another album of catchy, well-written songs whose lilting pop-rock is every bit as enjoyable as the infectious funk rhythm of the first two releases, which is saying plenty. And while the new album isn't as sonically varied as either of its predecessors, its concentration on a single style of music makes Thoughts From A Driveway the group's most consistent effort to date. And, all said and done, the new musical direction for Lloyd may very well represent not so much artistic reinvention, as merely a mastering of yet another musical genre by a group that seems to perform so many of them so well.