Falling Up - Captiva

Tooth & Nail Records / BEC Recordings

Falling Up has built quite the impressive following within the Christian rock community the last few years. The earlier albums found the three piece outfit wearing their influences too close to their creative sleeves. Many secular critics wrote off the band and their first two albums as merely nu-metal clones. On last year's Exit Lights, the band took a huge artistic risk having their previous material gutted by outside collaborators and remixed. Luckily for the band, and the listener, it paid off in spades.

For their new album it seems like Falling Up are riding the creative wave first found on the remix project. Produced by the always reliable Aaron Sprinkle (Mae, Eisley), Captiva delivers on the promise of the better material sandwiched between the clunkers on their first two studio albums. Fans of the Oregon's band's more pop-punk stuff will be all over "Maps" with its contagious chorus. I could easily see modern rock programmers adding this track to their regular rotations. But the edgier songs are what make Captiva really stand apart from most of their peers. The layered nuances found on tracks like "A Guide To Marine Life" lend the songs a new air of maturity that serves them well. It's hard to imagine the rhythmic experiments on "Drago or the Dragons" finding a place on Falling Up's past albums. But these are the moments were they truly triumph.

Carlos Ramirez