4 out of 5

Label: Red Ink Records

Producer: Tony Berg

See, this is a nifty example of when sounding good actually does carry your album a bit further.  It totes helps that Jonathan Bates is a gifted songwriter with a knack for biting lyrics and deep hooks, but ‘Box’ isn’t without some filler flaws.  Plus, patched together as new material and several re-recorded tracks, it’s hard not to hear it as something of a compilation if you’re already familiar with the songs.  And yet the disc is able to overcome those stumbles with Tony Berg’s sick production, which plays perfectly with Bates’ electro-pop sensibilities… and the artist’s harsher notes keeping the songs rooted from becoming too quirky.  So the sound is absolutely Bates, but it’s edged appropriately along by Berg.  A good thing for a producer to do, yes?

The new material, honestly, is the best.  Bates would become more confident in letting his jams ring out and also less brash with his lyrics, resulting in much smoother and truer jams (which got even smoother and truer hereafter).  Smartly, then the album opens and closes with mostly the new stuff, the intro lead-in ‘C’Mon Try a Little Bit’ a great warm-up for the instant rock and shine of ‘Oh My,’ which flips to the snarky ‘Four Leaf Clover.’  Berg makes this stuff all vibey, but again, Bates croon and appreciation of some rough edges holds the flourishes down to just the right amount.  There’s an instant interruption in the flow of things when we jump to our first remake – ‘Fashionably Uninvited.’  It’s hard to pinpoint, but it just doesn’t transition as well.  The reward is that these are exactly the same tracks but totally new.  The first go-round were bedroom affairs, and now we get a full studio burst behind it, so the tracks are totally different entities even though the notes are the same.  And transition interruptus or not, they’re still great tracks.

Things do meander for a few songs – this happens on ‘Angry Bear’ also, just good pop rock tracks but without the spark that makes them stick in your brain – and then the hauntingly awesome closer ‘Limb to Limb.’

Friends of mine were a little dismissive of this disc, especially due to the rerecorded tracks, as it was too ‘plugged in’ in comparison.  But the ‘intellectual property’ EP (where we most started, myself included) certainly rocked out as well, and there’s no denying that this is the same dude behind the hits.  So if you can accept the big sound, there’s so much to appreciate here, and for once, a professional sheen isn’t being used to hide anything but enhance what’s already pretty damn great.