Rival Factions — Project 86

Rival Factions is the sixth studio album by Project 86, the Orange County band Andrew Schwab has fronted since 1996. Tooth & Nail released it on June 19, 2007, two weeks later than first planned. It's ten songs in just under thirty-five minutes, and it's the record where a band known for heavy, serious, slightly cryptic hard rock started having fun with synthesizers and 1980s pop hooks. Some old fans flinched. Most critics loved it.

Where it came from

By 2007 Project 86 had already been through a lot. They'd made their name with Drawing Black Lines in 2000, tried the major-label route with Atlantic on Truthless Heroes in 2002, split with the label, put out a record on their own, and gone back to Tooth & Nail for ...And the Rest Will Follow in 2005.

Rival Factions brought two big changes. Original drummer Alex Albert was gone, and Jason Gerken, who'd played in Shiner and Open Hand, took over behind the kit. The rest of the lineup stayed put, with Schwab on vocals, Randy Torres on guitar and Steven Dail on bass, and both Torres and Dail now added keyboards. The other change was the producer. Instead of GGGarth Richardson, who'd made Drawing Black Lines and ...And the Rest Will Follow with them, the band worked with Ulrich Wild, whom Jesus Freak Hideout introduced as the "Deftones producer."

The first taste came in mid-June 2007, just days before release, with the video for the opener, "Evil (A Chorus of Resistance)." Fans still remember it mostly for a food fight, including a chef spraying mustard and ketchup into a man's face. It was a sign that the band wasn't taking itself quite so seriously anymore.

What it sounds like

The opening three songs will feel familiar to anyone who grew up on the band. "Evil," "Put Your Lips to the TV" and "The Forces of Radio Have Dropped a Viper into the Rhythm Section" are tight, riff-heavy and loud. Jesus Freak Hideout's Sean Lex called "Forces of Radio" the song that "just plain rocks your face clean off your skull," and it's hard to argue with him.

Then comes "Molotov," and the record turns a corner. It's a poppy song about walking away from the party scene to save yourself, with guitar leads straight out of the mid-1980s. Lex put it bluntly: "If you can't hear 1985 in the pop groove and guitar leads, turn in your banana clip and/or slap bracelet and find the exit." He heard A Flock of Seagulls in it. Jo-Ann Greene at AllMusic went further and called it "the best song the Mission never wrote nor performed."

"Illuminate" leans even harder on keyboards. Greene said it sounds "ripped right out of the Duran Duran songbook, assuming Duran Duran were a punk band with goth pretensions." "Pull Me Closer, Violent Dancer" is the strangest thing on the album, a song about dancing whose title nods to Elton John's "Tiny Dancer," with a bridge that drops down to synth claps, a kick drum and the band chanting. "Caveman Jam" runs on a pounding drum pattern and a buzzing bass line, and pokes fun at people who hear heavy music and assume it must be angry or evil.

The closer, "Normandy," is built around a car crash metaphor, and Schwab sings it in a croon that more than one reviewer compared to Billy Idol. Lex also heard Pete Burns of Dead or Alive in it.

What holds all of this together is that it still sounds like Project 86. The synths sit inside the songs rather than on top of them. A user reviewer at Sputnikmusic wrote that they're "employed brilliantly, never standing out, but always adding to the mix perfectly." Greene made the same point from the other side, saying there's still "hard rock and metalcore a-plenty" here, "tough-edged and muscular enough to sate all but the most fanatical metalhead."

What it's about

Schwab's lyrics have never been simple worship songs, and this record is no exception. Andree Farias at Christianity Today noted that "the album isn't exactly faith affirming, though there is an interesting theme about opposing spiritual forces lying underneath." That theme is right there in the title and in the opener's subtitle, "A Chorus of Resistance."

Several songs work as short moral stories. Greene wrote that some of them fall "into story-telling dollops of poetic justice." "Molotov" is about choosing to leave something that's hurting you, even when friends push back. "Illuminate" is a call to light up the dark, with a chorus of "Light em up, light em up, in the dark let's ignite." The Sputnikmusic reviewer did think the lyrics were less cryptic than on the previous two albums, which some longtime fans counted as a loss.

How it was received

The reviews were strong across the board. At AllMusic, Greene said that with it "P86 have magnificently broadened their horizons." Farias called it "unquestionably one of the tightest, most engaging rock albums Project 86 has ever recorded, and a bright spot in a rather dull year for Christian rock." Farias summed up the sound as "a cross between The Juliana Theory and The Killers."

Jesus Freak Hideout was the most excited of all. Lex called it "absolutely their best album since Drawing Black Lines, and that is really saying a lot." His colleague John DiBiase, in a second opinion on the same page, called it the band's "arguably most diverse and perhaps most risky venture yet," and admitted the lack of the old "face-pounding aggression" was "as shocking as it is slightly jarring."

Not everything landed. Lex named "Pull Me Closer, Violent Dancer" the weakest song and warned that the album doesn't flow as smoothly from start to finish as Drawing Black Lines or ...And the Rest Will Follow. The songs fit together, he said, "but they are all very different." Fans who wanted another "Stein's Theme" didn't get one.

The verdict

Rival Factions is the most fun Project 86 ever sounded, and it gave up very little to get there. The heavy songs are still heavy, the new wave turns on "Molotov" and "Illuminate" are genuinely catchy, and at under thirty-five minutes it never outstays its welcome. It's not perfect. "Pull Me Closer, Violent Dancer" is more interesting than good, and anyone who loves the band for its weight and its mystery may miss both. But a band ten years in, a drummer down and a few years past a major-label disappointment had every reason to play it safe, and Project 86 chose to take a risk instead. It paid off.

8/10

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