Almería (2012)

Almería is the sound of Lifehouse throwing out the map. After a decade-plus of refining their post-grunge-into-polished-pop-rock formula, they pivoted hard into Americana, western twang, and desert atmosphere, and it produced one of the most surprising, ambitious, and rewarding records in the entire catalog. Nothing else in their discography sounds like this. Nothing else in 2012 did either.

It announces the reinvention from the first note. Gotta Be Tonight is immediately unlike anything they’d done, big center-stage twang, throaty gritty vocals, modern production loops, all of it grand and rising to the occasion. It’s the perfect opener because it sets expectations, and it sets them large. Then comes the record’s showpiece single. Between the Raindrops features the effortlessly charming Natasha Bedingfield, and I remember the video catching the dying days of the VH1 and MTV music mornings. It’s a modern-day western built on haunting harmonies, where the drums feel larger than life. Natasha’s ethereal vocals are perfectly offset by Jason’s gruff, and those low-end guitar notes are everything, rich, dark, vibrant, and addictive.

From there the album shows how wide its new range really is. Nobody Listen is one of the most commercially accessible cuts, more pop than rock, but genuinely unique, production synths warping around massive group harmonies, urgent-but-controlled drums, and a five-star pop melody from Jason. There’s even an aerospace-sounding middle eight, a little like Learning to Fly by Pink Floyd. Then Moveonday cranks the grit and distortion back up to eleven. This is true grit, deeply western, the kind of song built to score a montage of a cowboy squaring up for a duel at high noon, all vocal strain and call-to-arms energy.

The middle of the record is where the atmosphere gets rich and strange, in the best way. Slow Motion sounds alive and buggy, like a candlelit porch in the Louisiana marsh, with a sitar adding a genuinely new texture to the band’s toolkit, and Bryce’s bass pushed right to the front. It’s a ballad, slow-motion for sure, but there are far too many layered harmonies and instruments in it to ever get bored. Only You’re the One turns immediately dramatic, floor toms pounding, the whole thing feeling like nightfall by a fire right before something big happens. The chorus is larger than life, the drums hit with real emphasis, and Jason nearly cries the melody out over hooded, dark, ominous group harmonies. Where I Come From offers a lighter moment, guitar played with an almost banjo-like rhythm, twinkling, with a nice cello underneath.

And then the peak. Right Back Home is, undeniably, the greatest Lifehouse song to date. I still remember the disbelief on my father’s face and mine when the band began the intro live at Mardi Gras, Orlando in 2012-2013, it was insane. The snare shuffle, the Americana twang, the Hammond organs, the vocal duetting, the gnarly shredding guitar solos trading off against dueling organ solos, it all builds into something genuinely complex and completely out of left field for 2012. This song never gets old, and it’ll be on every desert-island mix I make until the end of time.

After a peak like that, the record knows exactly when to breathe. Barricade is the comedown, a soft, twang-infused slice of middle-America country, all warm pedal steel and Hammond organ, the kind of track that makes me picture big hay wheels rolling by. Aftermath then penultimately closes the standard album’s main run as Lifehouse’s melodramatic 2010s ballad crossed with the grandiose, dark-side-of-the-moon backing-vocal heights of Pink Floyd. Built on a warm, rich piano melody, its push and pull is a masterclass, and the full-band crash at the end only hits as hard as it does because the song earns it across the entire journey there.

The Deluxe additions are, remarkably, some of the record’s finest moments. Lady Day is one of the best things here, bouncy keys and a jazzy fusion with the album’s western warmth, nothing close to radio-conventional, and it always earned heavy replay from me for exactly that reason. Pins & Needles is the one my father always called the perfect modern three-minute pop song, more welcome Hammond organ and a hook that’s genuinely tough to shake. Rolling Off the Stone is another left-field swing, jazzy, bluesy, saxy, and full of attitude, with the bass right in your face, stinging Hammond organs, and dreamy Wurlitzer piano, the dark, serious floor toms contrasting the warm keys in a way that shouldn’t work but absolutely does.

The record lands on Always Somewhere Close, the closer on both editions. It deliberately strips away the album’s ambition and adventurousness to return to quintessential Lifehouse, love-centered lyrics, commercial pop-rock rises and falls, all of it. It’s a bit of a safe finish, but it never feels out of place, and after a record this daring, ending on something familiar plays almost like a wink.

Almería is the boldest thing Lifehouse ever did, and depending on who you ask, either the moment they lost the plot or the moment they found a new and better one. I’m firmly in the second camp. This is a band with nothing left to prove deciding to reinvent themselves anyway, chasing western twang and desert atmosphere and jazzy left turns purely because the songs were there to be written. It gave us Right Back Home, their greatest song. It gave us a duet for the ages and a bonus run better than most bands’ singles. And it did all of it while sounding like nothing else on Earth in 2012. If you wrote Lifehouse off as a post-grunge radio act, this is the record that proves you never knew them at all.

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Highlight Songs:

• Right Back Home

• Between the Raindrops

• Lady Day

• Aftermath

• Rolling Off the Stone

• Nobody Listen

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Own it, Stream it, Forget about it?

Own it, the Deluxe, and it isn’t close. This is Lifehouse at their most daring and inventive, home to Right Back Home, their greatest song, and a bonus run that outshines most bands’ A-sides. A no-skip reinvention that sounds like nothing else in their catalog or anyone else’s. Buy it, then whisper sweet things to it.

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Overall Rating:

5 Stars