Relient K "Two Lefts Don't Make a Right... But Three Do"

 I never got into Relient K’s self-titled debut album (2000), but I was well aware of all the buzz around it. My older friends from church told me it was basically a Christian version of New Found Glory, then let me borrow NFG’s debut (2000) CD (you know, the one with the condoms and Playboy magazines on the cover), which banged around in my discman for weeks, and had sound buried deep in the mix on the first track that always made me tear my headphones off, convinced the phone in the kitchen was ringing while I was rocking out in my bedroom. Regardless, something about Relient K didn’t click with my burgeoning music tastes, and the “Marilyn Manson ate my girlfriend” gag wasn’t as amusing to me as it was to others. 

Their sophomore follow-up The Anatomy of the Tongue in Cheek (2001), however, did work; every youth group was bumping “Sadie Hawkins Dance” on a regular basis during their teen turn-up nights and lock-ins, and the riffy punk of “Pressing On” and chuggy basslines of “The Rest Is Up To You” were absolute ear-candy for my 15-year old sensibilities. Theirs was the first concert I can recall attending, with my church youth group, carpooling to Bakersfield, CA to see them play at a Vans skatepark (fitting). Holland (memory-holed) and Bleach (underrated) opened; I remember Davy from Bleach climbing up on top of a tower of amps as they performed songs from their latest album Again, For the First Time (2002), an acrobatic feat I’d not witness again at such magnitude until I would watch Adam Lazarra scramble up the scaffolding on the main stage at Warped Tour a couple years later. Swinging his mic, the dipshit tangled in the 120ft cord; “mics are for singing, not swinging,” I’d think to myself. Of course, less than an hour later I’d witness Geoff Rickley helicoptering his microphone above the widening pit, but honestly – he made it look cool. The only moment of Relient K’s set I genuinely remember was at the end, when fans I couldn’t see inside the skate bowl from my vantage point across the room tossed packages of Skittles and Combos on stage as Relient K encored, ah, the rumors are true. 

Revisiting Relient K’s third album for the first time in probably about a decade, I’m struck by how rough around the edges Matt Thiessen’s vocals really are, occasionally gruff and growly, sounding now oddly juxtaposed against his bright, piano-driven melodies. Opener “Chap Stick, Chapped Lips, and Things Like Chemistry” has a fantastic chorus line that would make zero sense to a teenage listener today – “And I regret that I'm completely out of daytime minutes / And so I guess I'll have to wait a lot ‘til 8 o'clock comes around” – and evokes a lesson from the Lord before we’re even out of the bridge. That segues into the ‘playfully misogynistic’ punk anthem “Mood Rings,” a song with unreasonably thin guitars for being ‘clean’ Blink-182 fare in context and construction. They pull off the Blink trope in much stronger fashion later on with “Trademark” and “College Kids,” but one has to slog through the weakest section of side A with “In Love With the 80’s (Pink Tux to the Prom),” which conjures a stronger image of Harry and Lloyd in Dumb and Dumber than anything from The Breakfast Club. 

The album wavers its way through the rest of its slightly exhaustive tracklisting, tracks like “Kids On the Street” and “Gibberish” littering side B and undermining the strength of songs like “I Am Understood?” and “From End to End.” The album should of ended with “Getting Into You,” but Matt’s well-reported megalomania* gets the best of him with his first ‘long-song’ experiment “Jefferson Aero Plane'' doing more to softly ground the album rather than send it out soaring (he’ll get it right a few albums later, however, when 2007’s Five Score… closes out with the fantastic “Deathbed.”) The hidden track is laughably awful, but at the album’s conclusion you can see them squaring all their positions in preparation for their 2004 breakout MMHMM. 

Two Lefts…, incidentally, was also the first album I can recall having variants, 4 different CD covers each illustrated with a different crashed car in stark monochromatics. I couldn’t, for the life of me, understand what would compel someone to purchase four copies of an album when each had the exact same songs on it…and this was all before the vinyl variant boom.

I ran merch for Relient K at Uprising Festival in September 2006, a volunteer position that paid with free tickets to the event, agreeing to work a late shift during their set so I could watch Starflyer 59 perform earlier in the day while the sun was stuck burning in the middle of the Southern California sky. I met Matt Hoopes (the other Matt in Relient K) that day, who was very kind and grateful we were slinging their ridiculously designed t-shirts – but I also met Jason Martin that day, so I guess I owe Relient K at least that much. 

* I can distinctly remember a HM Magazine cover story on Relient K, likely from around the time Five Score… was released, when a newly added guitarist to the band described his role as “Matt’s bitch.”