Customer Rating:  
Summary: My New Favorite Group
Comment: I recently heard the song You and Me by Lifehouse and absolutely fell in love with it...no pun intended. It is such an incredible song and fun to play on a guitar, by the way. I bought the CD because of the song but enjoy the whole thing. My favorite songs are You and Me, All in All, and Better Luck Next Time. All my friends like this group too...we blast it in the car.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A personal favorite
Comment: This CD, the third from Lifehouse, is one of my very favorites. I have been a fan since their first disc, and the radio airplay of "Hanging by a Moment" exploded on the scene.
Here they have branched out into quieter more AC type melodies rather than just cranking out another set of songs exactly like all of their others and in my mind the results were stunning. "You and me" is a gorgeous song. You can play it for anyone between the age of 15 and 50 and they might not know the name of the song or the band, but they will know the song...and most likely like it as well.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Beautiful....
Comment: Unlike past albums, this album reveals a softer side of the band, which is not bad at all! Jason's voice does wonderful things in this album. The songs are so melodic and although slower than their other songs, they manage to be really catchy! I definitely recommend this album!
Customer Rating:
Summary: because I tried
Comment: It may well be that LIFEHOUSE fired their three working bullets on the first tracks of this eponymous and excellent album.
Then again, maybe not. The rest of these tunes are pretty good work. It's just a little tough keeping up with the right-left-another-right emotional impact of 'Come Back Down', 'You and Me', and 'Blind'. Lifehouse could pull a Simon & Garfunkel and disappear after this album and we'd still warm to these first three exquisite and pathos-filled songs twenty years hence. We'd remember who we were when we first heard them.
That's good music-making.
It is no small thing to turn melancholy into music in just this way, then to evade the speeding bullet of melodrama by finding the thin thread of hope that runs through the slice of life that Lifehouse chronicles for us here. 'Come Back Down' narrates the promise to be there for a self-destructive lover. This is the expression of a settled life, one that has come to term with the ebbs and flows of life that leave one high or, at times, just dry. There is no exaggeration in it, no overstated drama. No panic, no overt neediness. Just a slightly cool, steadily warm-hearted, open-eyed assessment of how things are:
'I hope that you can find your way back
To the place where you belong
When you come back down
If you land on your feet
I hope you find a way to make it back to me
When you come around
I'll be there for you
Don't have to be alone with what you're going through
You're coming back down
You say you feel lost can I help you find it
When you come around
From time to time we all are blinded
You're coming back down
You don't have to tell me what you're feeling
I know what you're going through
I won't be the one that lets go of you'
Most of us will never know a love like that, though we can glimpse it when the tale is sung to us with this breed of poignance.
Yet the smooth, easily-digested sound of Lifehouse is also capable of carrying the story of a man who's become quite smitten. The second track of the album's blockbuster opening tells the story. If the b-word sounds overheated, listen to tracks 1-3 a handful of times in a row and tell me it doesn't announce a rite du passage of a now grown-up band:
'There's something about you now
I can't quite figure out
Everything she does is beautiful
Everything she does is right
'Cause it's you and me and all of the people with nothing to do
Nothing to lose
And it's you and me and all other people
And I don't know why, I can't keep my eyes off of you
and me and all other people with nothing to do
Nothing to prove
And it's you and me and all other people
And I don't know why, I can't keep my eyes off of you
What day is it?
And in what month?
This clock never seemed so alive'
This is Sting-quality love-song writing, a cruising at altitude that one might find once or twice in a strong band's best album. That Lifehouse should prove capable of turning the diamond slowly in good light, setting facet after facet of their craft before us without blemish, is almost astonishing. Turning again to the wonder that is tracks 1-3, one finds them capable even of exquisite anguish. 'Blind' is the song that does it:
'After all this time
I never thought we'd be here
Never thought we'd be here
When my love for you was blind
But I couldn't make you see it
Couldn't make you see it
That I loved you more than you'll ever know
A part of me died when I let you go
After all this why
Would you ever wanna leave it
Maybe you could not believe it
That my love for you was blind
But I couldn't make you see it
Couldn't make you see it
That I loved you more than you will ever know
A part of me died when I let you go
That I loved you more than you'll ever know
A part of me died when I let you go'
The band can be forgiven if some of the tracks that follow suffer a benign mediocrity. They've proven a point. Coasting is a venal rather than a mortal sin when the artistry that gets us there is so fine.
Lifehouse's sound is gentle-thoughtful rock. Some reviewers have detected a certain sameness to their music. I find enough variation to hold my interest, though within the limits of a well-defined genre.
There's some great listening here, most of it front-loaded as a great introduction to a good album.
Customer Rating:
Summary: This group is great!
Comment: I love the sound of Jason's voice. It's a perfect blend of sound on each track. Can't wait to purchase the rest of their albums.
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