Five For Fighting
Two Lights (Aware/Columbia)
by Marc Hirsh

originally published in The Boston Globe, August 11, 2006

Five For Fighting’s fourth album finds John Ondrasik working from the template he established several years ago with the ubiquitous “Superman (It’s Not Easy),” with whisper-thin, back-of-the-throat vocals crooning over anonymous piano-band pop that seems like an afterthought to the pensive lyrics. The formula recently proved a winner for James Blunt, but if Two Lights doesn’t reach as strenuously for easy sentimentality as Blunt does, that’s simply because Ondrasik gets there with less effort. “The Riddle” purports to find the Meaning Of Life in the mouths of an innocent youth and a dying man “whose heart ran out of summers,” while the concept of freedom gets batted around in “Two Lights” and the nearly letter-perfect (but inferior) Elton John pastiche “Freedom Never Cries.” The problem is that Ondrasik never finds any middle ground between Big Statements and painfully awkward goofs like “California Justice” and “Policeman’s Xmas Party,” where a deeply uncomplicated synth bass and drum machine underscore an annoying vocal waver that highlights the forced wackiness of wince-inducing lines like “Get my funky on the dance floor” and “The Captain even likes to get freaky on my wife.” Even when it’s cutting loose, Two Lights sounds like a buzzkill.

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