Semisonic
All About Chemistry
MCA/Universal

While there are a lot of bands that make better pop music than Semisonic (in the sense that "pop" is a genre), there are few that make better Top 40-compatible music. In an age where radio guitar pop is dominated by snoozers like matchbox twenty, Creed, Vertical Horizion and 9 Days, it's baffling Semisonic hasn't hit any harder than it has. Despite any number of eligible songs on the band's first two albums, its only blip on the popular radar was "Closing Time," an agreeable song with the clever refrain "I know who I want to take me home," which marked the song as perhaps the '90s-beta-male anthem.

All About Chemistry finds Semisonic in more of an alpha-male mode. Among the guitar rock archetypes the album fires up are a surging hymn to a hyper-idyllic deflowering/one night stand ("Sunshine and Chocolate"), a chantey to "the loneliest kind of love" ("Get a Grip") and even a plea to/dis against the girl who won't put out ("Bed"). Not only were such chestnuts absent from the band's first two albums, they would have seemed a little out of place.

Given, Semisonic frontman Dan Wilson is probably the only lyricist among his contemporaries who would use the archaic "to bed" in the context of:

Show me a friendship that's pure and chaste
And I'll show you an engine that's dying to race
Well the time has come for me to find
Another way to get my soul fed
I know we could be the sweetest friends
But if that's where it ends
Then I'll find someone else to bed

and so while it's unmistakably Semisonic, there's nevertheless a definite sense of redefining boundaries. The band's previous album, Feeling Strangely Fine, was a minor modern classic which took its title from a tune called "All Worked Out" in which Wilson sang: "She's got it all worked out, I'm afraid/ And your life is arranged/ And it's strange but you're feeling fine." That line's a good benchmark for the rest of the album: The bulk of its love songs suggest a certain romantic contentedness — the joy of the relationship you're in. Not exactly burning-up-the-charts stuff, unless you're Faith Hill.

That redefinition of boundaries does and does not extend to the musicianship itself. All About Chemistry's hooks are sharper and shinier than those the band has previously offered, but that's not a slight against previous albums, which were well-served by less ostentatious, more gentle production. Here, the music's swagger is harder-edged and a little less ironic, but it's still in service of the band's impeccable pop craftmanship. The more delicate tunes — "Follow," the Carole King duet "One True Love" — are crowded out by the production gimcrackery of "Sunshine and Chocolate" and the soaring guitar licks of "I Wish," but when the band nails the balance between its traditional balladeering and its slicker production savvy, the results — "Act Naturally," "She's Got My Number" — are truly amazing.

A third example of this is the album closer, "El Matador," an unabashed evocation of the emotional tumult of the high school years. It's at the other end of the spectrum from whichever graduation anthem pops out of the woodwork each spring; the song is a lament for "the last young day of my life," and Wilson's carefully modulated vocals on each iteration of "Please don't go away/ Stay awhile," as backed by achingly understated keyboard and guitar parts and a vacant drum machine loop, paint a pitch-perfect portrait of how poignant closing the chapter on your youth can be.

"El Matador" will cement your understanding of just which age group All About Chemistry is aimed for: the one that drives music sales, but also the one that's always been pop music's core audience. And unlike a lot of its neighbors on the racks, All About Chemistry isn't immature so much as counter-mature; it's college rock for high school kids, revelling in that "Dawson's Creek" fantasia of bright, literate mini-adults. Whether they'll latch onto the album's best offerings remains to be seen, but the good stuff is good enough to warrant heavy rotation on any sensible pop station. If only that weren't an oxymoron.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)