Sunday, July 12, 2009
A+E, Music, Reviews

State of Man

"IN THIS PLACE" (POLYPLAT/FONTANA)

Most readers probably don’t realize that Atlanta’s State of Man has been banging around the scene since 2001. This is only the quartet’s second album in nine and a half years, and its first for a major label—a place it won’t take long for any listener to realize they clearly belong.

    This is huge, arena-sized music with super-sized, well, everything. Producer Rick Beato pushes all the buttons to make this sound like every other similarly oriented band signed to a major. Position the band somewhere between Collective Soul, Matchbox Twenty and Cartel, with an even more generic approach than the latter, resulting in melodic, lighter-waving choruses made for singing along in the back rows of the expansive venues they haven’t graduated to yet. Vocalist/guitarist John Stringer has easy-on-the-eye looks should any of these tunes, such as the opening, anthemic “Swallow Your Fears,” break into the national consciousness.
 
     To its credit, the band writes positive, even uplifting lyrics, and seems impervious to the fact that it spins off an endless stream of shopworn clichés. Taken on its own terms, though, the tunes are churned out with an appropriate radio-ready, spit-shined gusto that might connect with a less bombastic, more rootsy sensibility. 

    Give State of Man props for its “Service2Humanity” tour, “in which they’ll perform some form of community service in various cities before their concerts” (as the press release reads), and for sticking it out longer than anyone could have expected. 2 STARS—Hal Horowitz