I am walking on a wire
Tiptoeing through the fire
Never looking down to see that
I am walking on a wire
The pressure’s getting higher
By the time they got to Wire, Third Day had already started on their decline. This is, I think, really the last of their worthwhile albums, even if it is pretty flawed itself. The songs are a mixed bag here, but when they work, they work really well. The overwhelming mood of this album is a really interesting one, a mood of uncertainty and inadequacy. This is odd for two reasons. It’s out of place because this is a rock group and also a Christian group, both categories not known for openly flaunting self-doubt. The best song is Wire, a minor key ballad that is among the best songs the group has ever done, a song taken up with the fear of failure. On another excellent song, It’s a Shame, the narrator explores the cycle of an abusive relationship and the opening lines of the song are devastating: “I hate to be, to be the one who’s given up and feels all hope is gone.” The beautiful minor-key melody underlines the song’s underlying sadness; the song ends without any real hope of redemption or healing for either abused or abuser and all the narrator is left with is the ugly feeling of shame. Even on the rockers, the group deals with these issues. The high energy Rockstar isn’t the swaggering jam it sounds like; the chorus revolves around the repeated hook “I wanna be a rockstar, but I ain’t got what it takes.” On another of the best songs on the album, Blind, the singer muses on regrets and mistakes; “How could I have been so blind?” is the hook and it’s a darn catchy one musically, but hardly what one expects lyrically for a hook. But the album is too long at thirteen tracks. Especially given the way a lot of the tracks revolve around those specific themes of nagging self-doubt and regret, I wish the group had stripped things down and tightened the album up to really focus on those songs and cut some of the superfluous numbers that don’t really fit the theme. This could have been a tight, forty to forty-five minute record with a really strong unifying theme, but instead, it’s an album that has a fair amount of flab and a fair amount of songs that don’t really fit the theme. Still, none of the songs are terrible, just mediocre at worst, but there was a solid decade, it seems, when you could count on a Third Day record being superlative start to finish. Regardless, it’s worth hearing, the last of the Third Day albums I’d say that about, I think. A lot of that is down to the interesting, artistic theme, but a lot of the songs are really good as well. It’s a good album and an interesting one; one might make a point about the self-doubt that permeates this album and the fact that none of the group’s following albums have been worth much, but I’ll just let that stand on its own. For this album, though there’s some definite slippage, they’re still balancing just fine. 3 stars.
tl;dr – album is overlong, but it has a surprisingly emotional thematic unity around self-doubt & failure & a few songs worthy of the group’s catalog; last of the group’s records worth a listen. 3 stars.