With the band’s latest record, entitled The World’s Affair, The Story Of has finally made an attempt at something proper. However, their newfound expansion in quantity does little to remedy the overall contrivances of the collection’s quality.
Artists such as Sufjan Stevens and Page France are able to procure the imagery and metaphors of the Christian doctrine and make them beautifully approachable for even the most secularized soul, but the alternative power-pop within The World’s Affair does everything it can to draw lines in the sand. For The Story Of, the planet is on a one-way trip to hell, and everyone is in need of saving (the album opener is titled “EMT,” which may give you an indication).
After the mushy peace-on-Earth offering “Carry the Horizon” (“It’s tonight that we will fly above / Where the water and the sky make lovely / Harmony / And bring morning”) and the fairy-tale approach to gun control in “After Just a While” (We’ll throw the gun into a pile / And we’ll laugh and we will sing / Celebrate what we’ve achieved”), the overbearing preachiness gets scary with the army-of-God song “Armada” (“We all belong to one Union / There will be no compromise”).
– Mike Hilleary
The Story Of: www.thestoryof.net
Leroy Godspeed Records: www.leroygodspeed.com