Tag Archives: five iron frenzy

11/23/11

The Return of Five Iron Frenzy

8 Years ago yesterday a band I barely knew played their last show in Denver, Colorado. That band was Five Iron Frenzy and in the last 8 years they have become one of my favourite bands and had a huge impact on my life. Their mix of fun ska-punk music blended with a mix of beautifully profound or cleverly funny lyrics made them such a good band to listen to.

Five Iron Frenzy had this habit of drawing you into the music and then hitting you with the most profound God-lyric ever! We even had the worship band at our wedding adapt their song ‘World without End’ adapted to be played as a worship song.

Over the last few months the bands website contained a mysterious countdown and their Twitter and Facebook came to life, building hype around something that would happen at 2am this morning (or 7pm in the USA!)…having toyed with the idea of staying up or sleeping through and checking out twitter in the morning I opted in for a 1:55am alarm and hoped that it would be something worth disturbing my sleep for.

And it was!

I’d spent my day telling myself that it would be a greatest hits or rarities album and not a reform or anything new but how wrong was I?

Five Iron Frenzy announced (with a slightly bizarre video of Reese Roper in the desert) that they were getting back together and would be recording a new album (to release in 2013…10 years after their break-up) and possibly playing some shows….oh and they put a new song online!

Now the latter doesn’t excite me as much unless they venture to the UK (I wish!) but the thought of a new album and a chance to hear a new Five Iron song really got me excited. To make this new album the band were asking for pledges in return for a variety of things ranging from a CD of the new album to the band writing you a song…I went for the former and amazingly the band aimed to get $30,000 to make, master and release the album and amazingly they got that within 55 minutes and less than 24 hours later they’re on $80,000.

Turns out I’m not the only one excited about the new Five Iron Frenzy.

I was also pretty excited about the new song titled ‘It was a dark and stormy night’ and it’s so good! It’s like a mix of ‘Electric Boogaloo’ and ‘Our Newest Album Ever’ and I think will please all FIF fans.

So why the blog?

This blog is simply to express my burst of excitement…share the word and tell you to listen to Five Iron Frenzy…they’re amazing and so much fun but also seriously challenging.

Go listen, support and download at: www.fiveironfrenzy.com

Note: I also had a worship blog in mind to write which also included some stuff about FIF so this blog might end up a little FIF obsessed for a week or so!

04/21/10

The Rise & Fall of Five Iron Frenzy DVD Review

Back in 2003 the Christian band Five Iron Frenzy called it a day…played their last gig at Filmore (USA) and the 9 piece band separated…I was 17 and had never heard of the band. It wasn’t until I was introduced to them by Ben & Hayley individually in 2004 that I eventually purchased their EP ‘Quantity is job 1′ off amazon.

In the years following that I’ve managed to add all their albums except Cheeses (of Nazareth) and Upbeats and Beatdowns to my collection and have grown to adore their mix of ska-punk comprised with both fun and profound lyrics.

Earlier this year the ex-lead singer of the band Reese Roper finally announced that the long-awaited Five Iron Frenzy DVD would be released on the 13th April and that pre-orders would get it shipped a month early…I pre-ordered early March and anticipated the arrival of my DVD from the States.

A few weeks back the DVD arrived and I’ve almost finished watching it minus a few extras and wow…what a DVD!

The DVD is in fact 2 DVD’s….the first being the 3 hour documentary ‘The Rise & Fall of Five Iron Frenzy’ and the second labeled ‘This is a coaster’ is actually a disc of extras including the video of the live album ‘The end is here’ (the band’s last gig)..I’ll come back to the extras in a minute!

The Rise & Fall of Five Iron Frenzy

The 3 hour documentary covers the 9 years of the band and is mixed with interviews, live clips and goofy home movies the band put together and gives you a real insight to the passions, struggles and lives of the band members, their journey with God during the 9 years of Five Iron Frenzy and how the band really took off yet struggled with being in the middle of the Christian and secular genre.

The documentary is well put together and is very much a visual timeline…Reese Roper who did much of the editing hasn’t made the journey look like a nice a fluffy ride with God but has documented the struggles too which makes it a really genuine piece of documentary.

The Extras

Whilst the documentary is amazing the extras are something else completely.

Packed onto the 2nd disc are 5 music videos, 3 lives concerts, a few random clips and a whole host of short movies!

I’m not going to to review all of the extras but just the Filmore Gig Video.

Filmore was the last show the band ever played and so to have it on DVD is something very special. The video includes all the stuff that was cut from the live CD and there’s real emotion in the gig from the whole band. The real highlight was the 5 minute introduction Reese gives to Every New Day which was so powerful to watch.

and summing up…

To sum up the Five Iron Frenzy DVD is amazing and was well worth the $20 I spent on it however it is for the hardcore fans…if you just think ‘they’re alright’ then it’s probably not for you…borrow someone’s and watch the live Filmore gig!

I finish this post with the live video for ‘Every new day’

01/4/10

Worship?

In the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about the church and how trapped the majority of it has become. The format of church hasn’t changed majorly in the last 25 years at least…it certainly hasn’t changed in the 15 years of church I actually remember.

Alongside this I’ve been pondering the topic of worship…I love music but more and more I find myself feeling unsatisfied by ‘worship songs’ that the likes of Tim Hughes, Matt Redman and Stuart Townsend have to offer. In the case of Tim and Matt there’s some nice upbeat stuff but nothing ground breaking when it comes to lyrics and where Townsend makes up for this with lyrics they tend to be pretty traditional and jargon sounding and the tunes sound exactly the same as pretty much every hymn ever written.

The church has adopted a fairly standard pop-rock sound about it’s worship and I’m sure we’re missing something!

Someone said at a day I was on a while ago that ‘when you turn your mind back to God it’s an act of worship‘ yet the church is trapped in this attitude of worship meaning ‘to sing a few jargon filled pop-rock songs’.

Why is it that God has made us all very different yet we all have to fit the same worship mould? When was the last time you were in a church service with ‘different’ sounding sung worship or perhaps even a service with no songs at all?

In my thoughts on worship I’ve been thinking about songs which I find really help me connect with God so I thought I’d post a couple of youtube videos of them for your viewing pleasure.

In the meantime comment this post with your experience of church worship and ways which you connect with God and I shall continue these thoughts soon!

Five Iron Frenzy – Suckerpunch – Lyrics

Paramore – We Are Broken - lyrics

09/12/08

Profound Music

Recently I’ve been leading more worship at church and also I’ve been listening to a lot more Five Iron Frenzy and it strikes me that worship songs tend to be very similar, all full of the same kind of language and all making very similar (yet worthy) points about God, however very rarely do you find a worship song with anything profound….I should add that by worship song I’m thinking of people like Matt Redman, Tim Hughes, Stuart Townsend, Ben Cantelon etc.

Although musically Tim Hughes and Matt Redman’s current albums are brilliant and will set a new goal for quality in Christian worship music the lyrics lack anything new.

This is where Five Iron Frenzy come in….I’ve been listening to a lot of their ‘Electric Boogaloo’ album which I believe is one of their best and the lyrics of the song ‘Far, Far Away’ have really struck me, they’re not overly profound but they seem to take a very different angle than the lyrics our average church songs take…so here they are:

Staring at the shoreline
wishing for some hope
the weight of empty fishing nets
is more than twisted rope
And underneath stern faces
they wait with baited breath
with broken hearts from hoping
while casting out their nets
See the figure on the shore
He speaks His words like plain men sing
His hands they still have holes in them
glory to the King

[Chorus:]
Can you hear the bells are ringing
far, far, away?
Can you hear the voices singing
far, far, away?
I know that one day soon a song shall rise
you’ll hear it with the sleep still in your eyes

And Peter was a liar
a traitor just like me
and Judas was a hypocrite
and Paul a Pharisee
When truth can be so distant
and hope evades our reach
Peter swam across the water
and found it on the beach

I hear they’ll hang you upside down
stretched across two boards
for hearing distant voices
and crossing to the Lord

The thing with this song is that theologically it’s brilliant, at the same time I think it puts things in a very different way….I hope you like the lyrics as much as I do.

I wonder if there’s a place for songs like that in church worship?