By JJT (written for ThinkChristian.net)

The band’s latest album encourages the most fundamental of connections.

It is not good for man to be alone.

So opens the story between God and humankind. At the very beginning, we read that God brought all of his amazing animals before Adam to see if a suitable companion could be found. Adam named them all, but none were quite up to the task of being a true partner. He needed an equal, not just a beast of burden, a guardian, or something pretty to look at. So God took a part of Adam’s core—bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh—and made woman. Another human. An equal. A partner. Community! It was perfect … until it wasn’t.

Passwords, the new album from Dawes, continues to explore the nuances of this universal human condition, as the band has so deftly done since appearing on the scene in 2009. At first listen, it may seem that Dawes is retrenching in a sonic safe place, namely the “soft-rock” environs rendered so well by their mentor Jackson Browne. But closer examination reveals a significant lyrical shift. Although it’s been common to hear vocalist Taylor Goldsmith sing perfectly crafted verses about failed relationships, vanity, and the various and sundry effects of The Fall, for the first time we are catching slightly more optimistic glimpses of love discovered, repaired, or at least imagined.

The set opens with a “ripped from the headlines” riff-rocker, “Living in the Future,” which makes some bold observations about the “collective phantom pain” that we all find ourselves experiencing. “Just look around,” Goldsmith suggests before wryly referencing issues such as kneeling for the American national anthem, our dependence on devices, a loss of privacy, and political divisiveness. That the band bothers to even hint at some kind of answer, which in this case is as small as “shine a little light,” distinguishes Dawes from so many other millennial rock acts and, no doubt, costs them some fans amongst the more sardonic rock critics out there.

The cynics will convulse when they get to the third track, though. The first time I heard “Crack the Case” I was on an early morning run. While its gentle piano, acoustic guitar, and Goldsmith’s practically whispered vocal was not exactly motivational in its energy, the lyric devastated me. He compares the challenge of an artist explaining his work to a journalist to all of the other communication breakdowns that pit us against each other. “I want to sit with my enemies and say ‘We should have done this sooner,’ as I look them in the face. Maybe that will crack the case.” Whoa. I did not see that coming.

But then he gets to the second verse. A friend is going through a breakup after catching her husband cheating. Then “she heard a voice from beyond the throes, ‘Punish him for the life he chose, but forgive the past that he did not.’” Goldsmith then gets to what may ultimately be the theme of the entire album: “It’s really hard to hate anyone, when you know what they’ve lived through, and once they’ve given you a taste.”

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