It takes some balls to release a double album in this day and age, when most acts can barely muster the resources for a single disc. Then again, when you're a moderately successful but still mostly under the radar Swedish rock act with fondness for bands that made excess a big part of their art, perhaps it's more of a mystery why you don't release double-albums more often. Indeed, the well of maximum R&B from which the Soundtrack of Our Lives draw will never run dry. And that doesn't even take into account all the things the group can do to its 1960s psych and classic rock influences by filtering them through the subsequent forty-plus years of musical progress (not that the band has ever tried terribly hard to bring its rocking retreads "up to date").
Yet a double album today is a much more demanding proposition than it was in the time of Quadrophenia. The two discs of Communion , the Soundtrack of Our Lives' fifth full-length (with the emphasis on "full"), runs a total of a whopping hour and a half. To put that in classic rock perspective, that's about ten minutes longer than the aforementioned epic by the Who, which both had the advantage of a) a plot; and b) the band's already substantial iconic legacy.
Communion may not have a plot but it may, however loosely, have a concept, either one song for every hour of the day, or maybe even that old standby, a meditation on "the state of the world." Regardless, meaning isn't nearly as important here as execution, and to that end the band has easily come up with its best set of songs since its sort-of 2001 breakthrough Behind the Music. If not every track on the set is a winner, neither are there any outright stinkers. And then there's the added bonus that rarely does the album sound nearly as belabored as, say, Oasis, a band with which TSOOL's shares a certain dubiously defiant rockist mentality.
Unlike the oppressively self-conscious Oasis, however, there's a real joy driving the Soundtrack to Our Lives. And the result is an album that embraces both the bluster and the grandeur of past high-watermarks of portent with a refreshing lack of both irony and cynicism. It's this vital distinction that helps songs such as "Babel On", "Ra 88", "Mensa's Marauders", or the Faces-y "Thrill Me" kick into gear, or the band's unexpected remake Nick Drake's "Fly" take off in the mold of early Who (much as the Byrds similarly adopted so many Dylan songs as their own).
And that's just the first half. The slightly gentler second disc brings about a sigh of relief when the opener "Everything Beautiful Must Die" begins to solidify to suspicion that, hey, maybe the band will actually pull this thing off. It's a feeling ratified by songs such as "Flipside", the pretty instrumental "Digitarian Riverbank" and equally lovely "Lifeline", the stomp (but not obnoxious swagger) of "Reconnecting the Dots", and the Eastern-tinged "Utopia".
After all those songs and all that time, a lesser band might have finally given in to the urge and ended the album on the most over-the-top climax possible. But Communion ends instead with the pleasingly restrained conclusion "The Passover", by which time the Soundtrack of Our Lives have pulled off the rarest of victories: bombast minus the abuse.
