Ganging Up On the Sun: Guster Still Finds Hope 
by Mitch Mitchell

When Guster formed with its initial three members in 1991, while they were students at Tufts University, it was doubtful that any of the original three members thought they would still be playing together more than fifteen years later. Guster, however, did survive the fateful decade of the nineties, which for their part, included badly produced albums and less-than-inventive sounds, to release a commercially successful Keep It Together (2003). Keep It Together reached #38 on the US charts and placed Guster on the map, only to be almost forgotten during a three-year period of near-silence in the studio and atypically bare touring. But, lucky for music fans, Guster did not disappear altogether, yet had taken the time to reinvent their sound again for an even more successful project.

Guster’s most recent release, Ganging Up On the Sun (debuting at #25 and gathering some 52,000 units in sales since its release on June 20, 2006), brought the most mainstream attention that any subsequent effort by band members Ryan Miller, Adam Gardner, Brian Rosenworcel, and (newest addition) Joe Pisapia have ever seen. When Joe joined in 2003, he added a better bass-line foundation to the already strong harmonies and beats. Keep It Together was the fourth studio album, and it was ready for mainstream distribution with the Warner Bros. / Reprise stamp on it, but it was not so much radio friendly as it was fit for use in television and film. One such television credit was in the first season of The OC, featuring title track “Keep It Together.” Two film credits for soundtrack play include  “What You Wish For” and “Rainy Day” in Life as a House and “I Hope Tomorrow Is Like Today” in Wedding Crashers. But it was Ganging Up On the Sun that debuted as a top album on iTunes and had hit-worthy singles packaged for radio and ringtone play.

Ganging Up On the Sun initiates the listening experience with “Lightning Rod.” This track begins with the sparse instrumentation emulating the sound of an orchestra warming up. It is appropriate, since the production order of this album does function as to have “Lightning Rod” as its priming piece. There is very little melodic structure in the track, excepting the lead vocals and muted synthesizer. The warm reverb of electric guitar patterns the main rhythm and only receives assistance by hand percussion on the fills. Lyrically, “Lightning Rod” is necessarily spare; the emphasis is on the harmony of the vocals, which is only fully appreciated in a humming pattern in the semi-chorus. The words of the verses provide the namesake for the track and not much else to chew on. Considering that alone, this track has very little use outside of this album as a whole, although it is well-produced and well-written, but it should be noted that it loses focus if taken outside the main context of the album.

This next track is truly a song, and can function as an entity unto itself. Titled “Satellite,” it still retains the softness of heart found in the guitar part-writing, but adds hints of distortion and follows a more conventional pattern of verse-chorus feel. The bass and percussion parts really come into play with “Satellite,” as they drive the album into a more full and accurate swing. The lyrics are typical fare of Guster with the chorus line “You're my satellite / You're riding with me tonight / Passenger side, lighting the sky / Always the first star that I find / You're my satellite.” The bridge tagged onto the end sums up the mood of the song “Maybe you will always be / Just a little out of reach.” The song has a literal lightness of sound, but the arrangements and even the apparent mood of the lyricist maintain a distance, a distance that observes a beauty, a love held dear, but far.

Then the album takes a change of pace. The next track is bright and bold—as it should be. “Manifest Destiny” is bombastic, with a stylistically percussive piano melody driving the core of it along. The drums and bass are also written to be more accentuated and the lyrics are dirty and almost angry.  Everything is moved to be more forward in placement, whether in word or in the sound of the track. In “Manifest Destiny” the idea of moving away from a core or rather moving toward the concept of rebellion is mentioned. The name of the album is taken from the lyric “The moon and stars are ganging up on the sun / Rebellion.” A sort of status quo in “Born to the land of opportunity / Of manifest destiny”  is attacked with the chorus:

You and I could quit this scene

Build a town and then secede

Like an Adam and an Eve

To the dreamers go to the dreams

But the leaders have the lead

It's a frightening, frightening thing

Following all rebellion, that idea is trumped with an air of high school nostalgia in “One Man Wrecking Machine.” This track was the first single off of the album, released online prior to the release date of the album. “One Man Wrecking Machine” is perhaps one of the most radio-friendly Guster songs to date; it has all the Pop wonder that anyone could desire, and the lyrics are catchy enough. What makes the track lyrically significant is that it turns on the idea of going “Back with my high school friends / Meeting where the train tracks end.” The lyrics reply in kind: “No point in living in my adolescent dreams / Inspired by true events on movie screens / I am a one man wrecking machine.” Ultimately, the process is futile, overly quaint and marginalizing, akin to the based-on-a-true-story phenomenon. The song as a whole challenges the listener not to look to the past for regard in meaning and purpose.

Just as the previous track is evidence against looking back for meaning, “The Captain” furthers the conversation, functioning more as a tag to “One Man Wrecking Machine” than its own self-sufficient track. If not the past, where is the motion? “I've come down with something / I'm frozen, tied up, cast in lead.” Not to worry. “It's simple, so says the captain / Face forward, move slow, forge ahead.”  The final refrain closes out the track with multiple repetitions and an electric guitar solo, crash and kick-driven drums, and frantic banjo plucks. All of the above drive the melodic structure forward to meet the sum of the final lyric: “Onward.”

“The New Underground” follows the optimism of the previous song, but it trumps any such positive statement already made in the album. The entirety of the track is distorted and the lyrics can be summed up in the line “We are standing in the trenches / Of the new underground.” Likewise, there is little light in this song, venturing into the noisy and subterranean. Perhaps the biggest contrast of the album happens when the sound of “Ruby Falls” answers “The New Underground.” The guitar moves back to a less distorted variety and an earthy organ helps provide a lasting sustain throughout much of the song. One of the more hopeful lyrics is found in the core of “Ruby Falls”:

Somewhere down buried in the sand

Two birds give out a song

And all of Ruby Falls is singing along

“Ruby Falls” remains pensive and questioning  like the rest of the album (Where do we go from here? / The road to Ruby Falls has reached the end”), yet ventures into the more optimistic and collective (“The afterlife is ours in the end”). The track “C’mon” continues the theme of pressing forward with a fresh dose of the same. The chorus bring in the mainstay of the song, saying, “We'll be alright, we'll be easy / Don’t look back, don’t look back / Just c'mon, c'mon, c'mon."

“Empire State” tones down the mood and takes the listener back to the original meager instrumentation. “Empire State” is more a song of lyrical irony than anything else. Each statement is immediately paired with some version of its opposite. For example, “Been one in a million / Been a million to one” is one such line. Ostensibly, this song is a sort of Guster tribute to New York City. The chorus is a very authentic tribute: “All hands up, salute the Empire State.” And the reference to the World Trade Center tragedy is at once obvious and skillfully downplayed in the lyric: “Ten miles tall in this: an empty space / Fallen walls all around / We'll build again / Rebuild again.”

“Dear Valentine” is somewhat of a disappointment. Its sound wears thin upon multiple listens of the album, and it is thus prone to be a skipped track victim. One should be  willing to give Guster the benefit of the doubt and shadow this weak track with a mulligan. Fortunately, the next track, “The Beginning of the End” (cleverly, the second to last track), picks up the fumble and carries it onward. The grunge reappears and the rhythm is revamped with a jumpy bass and agitated guitar. The lyric again journeys into the apocalyptic, as the name of the track implies, and the paradigm of the lyric: “I'm the judge and jury / I'm the lion and the lamb / And this is the beginning of the end.”

The final track, “Hang On,” brings the dual crisis of time and identity to a main fold. It also revisits the orchestral warm-up vibe of the very first track, with the very noticeable additional part of a brightly-tuned piano that pushes and drives the melodic pattern ever-forward. By its very essence, “Hang On” restates most of the main ideas found in the lyrics of all the tracks leading up to this point:

If we fell inside a forest

Would it make a sound

It doesn't seem there's anyone around

Days are long we carry on

But still don't understand

We're a million miles away

Of course, the album cannot hold its end in hopelessness, so Guster provides a final declaration:

“We break / We bend / With hand in hand / When hope is gone / Just hang on / Hang on.” The study in contrasts, pairing a hybrid of despair and pessimism against a you-may-never-understand-why hope is what makes the album a cohesive element. Strangely, there seem to be more lyrical elements in favor of discouragement—and little case for carrying onward—but the album’s conclusion ultimately stands to say that, even though the light is substantially dim, there is merit in pressing on. This much is indeed true, regardless of evidence to the contrary. There will ever be that unexpected, inconceivable hope. So much is ganging up on the sun, but its light has seen countless dawns, has vanquished many clouds, and amazingly, its light still prevails.