Mmhmm — Relient K

Mmhmm is Relient K's fourth full-length album. It's the one that took a Christian pop-punk band from Ohio onto mainstream radio. Gotee Records and Capitol Records put it out together on November 2, 2004. It's fourteen songs in about fifty minutes, all written by singer Matt Thiessen, and it gets an 8/10.

How it came together

By 2004 Relient K had made three albums, all with producer Mark Lee Townsend. They went back to him for this one. They recorded at Dark Horse Recording in Franklin, Tennessee, and Thiessen produced alongside Townsend. Thiessen wrote most of the album between January and April that year.

The lineup was Thiessen on lead vocals, piano and rhythm guitar, Matt Hoopes on lead guitar, Brian Pittman on bass and Dave Douglas on drums. Pittman left the band in June 2004, before the album came out. He said he wanted to start a landscaping company. He'd still played on most of the record, so he kept his credit. John Warne took his place. Warne also sang extra vocals on More Than Useless and Who I Am Hates Who I've Been.

Money shaped the sound in one small way. Thiessen later said the band could only afford to have Tom Lord-Alge mix three songs. So they picked the three they thought might be singles. Lord-Alge mixed Be My Escape, High of 75 and My Girl's Ex-Boyfriend, and J.R. McNeely mixed the rest. Then, in late October 2004, the band signed with Capitol. They said they wanted to reach a bigger audience.

What you're hearing

The jokes didn't disappear, but they got pushed to the edges. The band had made its name on silly songs. This time Thiessen chose to write more thoughtfully. Many of the songs are about his own past mistakes, looking back and finding hope. The band said it hoped fans were "willing to grow up a bit with us."

Musically, it's still pop-punk at heart. High of 75 and More Than Useless are fast and loud. So is the one-minute blast with the longest title on the record, The Only Thing Worse Than Beating a Dead Horse Is Betting on One. But piano turns up all over the album, often in soft outros at the end of the heavier songs. Hoopes said the goal was to make "a good rock record" that "has its own character." Some people called it a big change. Thiessen didn't see it that way. He said, "I really like the mellow stuff and obviously like the energy and the rock 'n' roll."

Be My Escape builds into the biggest chorus the band had written. It's a prayer from someone who knows he's been running the wrong way. Who I Am Hates Who I've Been is about the same fight. It's the gap between the person you want to be and the one you were yesterday. And the album closes with When I Go Down. It's nearly seven minutes long, slow and plain.

What the critics said

At Jesus Freak Hideout, Josh Taylor called it the band's "most aggressive work to date." He said there was growth, but "in much more subtle ways than on past releases." His reason was that the band "had almost perfected their art" on Two Lefts Don't Make a Right...but Three Do. This album, he wrote, "simply builds on what was already a very good thing, while tactfully experimenting with different sounds." He said the piano outros were the change you'd notice most. He called the album "one of the best releases of the year."

At Cross Rhythms, Steve Best said the band had "upped the ante with a mixture of tongue-in-cheek fun" and reflection "which never dips in quality and credibility." He called Townsend "ridiculously talented and tasteful."

IGN gave it 7.8 out of 10. It said the album "manages to be spiritual without being heavy-handed, varied without sounding spastic, and clean-sounding without coming off as manufactured." The same review said Thiessen's thanks to God on I So Hate Consequences was "the emotional pinnacle of the record."

AbsolutePunk gave it 90 percent. AllMusic's John D. Luerssen was cooler. He felt the band sometimes came off "a bit too mainstream for their own good." But he gave them credit for not "going straight for the jugular the way so many other Christian rockers might." At PopMatters, Kenneth Yu said it brought back memories of teenage angst, the search for identity and "coming to terms with my faith." Stylus Magazine and Punknews.org were more mixed.

Faith up front

Relient K never hid the faith, and Mmhmm doesn't either. It just stopped explaining it. I So Hate Consequences and When I Go Down are openly about Thiessen's Christianity. Critics kept making the same point about them. They don't feel preachy. That's the trick of this record. The songs about God and the songs about girls use the same plain words. And they're written by the same guy, who knows he gets things wrong.

How it did

It did better than anything the band had made. Mmhmm debuted at No. 15 on the Billboard 200. It sold 51,473 copies in its first week, and it went to No. 1 on the Christian Albums chart. It went gold in 2005 and has sold more than 800,000 copies in the US. Be My Escape was the band's first song on the Billboard Hot 100, where it reached No. 82. Who I Am Hates Who I've Been climbed to No. 58. Both singles went gold.

In 2005 the band opened for Good Charlotte and Simple Plan and played the Warped Tour. Later that year it headlined its own US tour, with MxPx in support. The album won the Dove Award for Rock Album of the Year in 2006. It also earned a Juno nomination in Canada.

Ten years later, the band reissued it as Mmhmm10. They toured it too, playing the album start to finish, with Douglas back on drums. Jesus Freak Hideout reviewed one of those 2014 shows and called Mmhmm the band's "career best album."

Where the score lands

Here's why it's an eight. Be My Escape and Who I Am Hates Who I've Been are two of the best singles any Christian band put out in the 2000s. And they got there without watering anything down. Thiessen's songs are honest about failure, and the piano gives the loud stuff somewhere to land.

So why not a nine? Fifty minutes is long for pop-punk. And a few of the short joke songs feel like leftovers from the band's sillier early days. Why not a seven? Because the best songs here still hit as hard as they did in 2004. The closing run, from Who I Am Hates Who I've Been to When I Go Down, is the band at its most serious and its most sure.

Watch

First up is the official music video for Be My Escape. After it comes the official video for Who I Am Hates Who I've Been.

Where this album sits on Loud Faith

Mmhmm is the brightest record on our emo shelf. If you liked the big choruses of Anberlin's Cities or the warmth of Mae's The Everglow, start here. It came out the same year as They're Only Chasing Safety. It's the sing-along side of that same scene.