Album Of The Day: The Big Surprise by The Elms

Album Art of The Elms's The Big Surprise album - On a light orange background, the outline of four young men is printed in a darker orange taking up most of the area, with the tallest person in the right and two people on the left, one sitting in front of the other. They all have hair of a few inches long, looking like the early Beatles or something. Repeated in the bottom is the same outline of the same four people, this time in a bright pink. In the top left, it says the band name, first word in white and the second in pink, in smaller text. Below it it says 'big surprise' in larger letters all in white, so that the 'the' applies to both the band name and album title.

"Who got the meaning of it all?" Released 25 years ago today, this is the first album from rock band The Elms, one of my all-time favorite bands. Though their later works became more guitar-focused rock, this album lands in the world of power pop, songs with melodic hooks, vocal harmonies and cheerful-sounding music. Even right from this first album, the band was tight and sounds great, though I would like their later albums with an even better, more pronounced guitar sound, "Hey, Hey" opens the album with a fun pop/rock earworm, and songs like "The Buzzing Won't Stop" and "A Minute To Ourselves" keep it moving. The quirky lyrics and epic vibe of the title track is one of my favorites on this album, along with the closing track "Real Men Cry". And "Lifeboat" is a great rock song with a religious angle. Though on a Christian music label for their first two albums, The Elms was never really making music for Christians, just trying to make music for the world at large, and I love how they did that with excellence and love.

Release Year: 2001
Listen on Apple Music
Listen on Spotify

Categories: 
Album Of The Day
Music

Add new comment

More information about text formats

Filtered HTML

  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <blockquote> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd> <img>
  • You can enable syntax highlighting of source code with the following tags: <code>, <blockcode>, <c>, <cpp>, <drupal5>, <drupal6>, <java>, <javascript>, <php>, <python>, <ruby>. The supported tag styles are: <foo>, [foo].
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.