October 24th, 2013 
Troy Sennett 
Artist: The Swellers
Album: The Light Under Closed Doors
Genre: Pop punk
The Swellers might be the most underappreciated band in pop punk. After more than eleven years, four full-length records, and a trip through the label ringer, the Flint, MI quartet is so used to the lack of recognition that it has even become part of their brand. All that could change soon though. The Swellers have found a new (and more fitting) home on No Sleep Records, and their first release for the label, The Light Under Closed Doors, is their most raw and honest work yet.
The first thing you’ll probably notice about The Light Under Closed Doors is how quickly it’s over. Every song on the album is stripped down to its bare essentials, with no extended intros or outros, no unnecessary interludes, and no fat left to trim. It’s a writing style that works extremely well for the band. “Should,” for instance, takes less than a minute to get to its triumphant bridge, where frontman Nick Diener sings, “Now I see the light under closed doors. I’m better now, so let it out. Let it all out.” The line serves as a rallying cry for a band that has found a comfortable niche after a long process of searching and rejection.
The Swellers do seem like a comfortable band on The Light Under Closed Doors. They found a sound that suits them extremely well on Good For Me, and they have continued to refine it through last year’s Running Out of Places To Go EP and more still on this release. Nowhere is this more apparent than on “High/Low.” The song’s slow, deliberate stomp and yearning melody might be a risky move for other pop punk bands, but it sounds perfectly natural here. The same goes for the guitar solos peppered throughout the record. Some might say that the guitar solo is a lost art in pop punk these days, but you’d never know it from songs like “Friends Again (We Can’t Be)” and “Favorite Tune.” To be fair, the “solos” I’m talking about are more guitar variations on the songs’ melodies than examples of Guitar Hero-worthy shredding, but succinct as they are, they let the guitar shine in a genre where it is more often than not relegated to a purely rhythmic instrument. The little callbacks also add a cohesiveness that keeps the songs from meandering at their midway points, not an uncommon problem in this genre.
There are undoubtedly Swellers fans out there who are impatiently waiting for the band to revisit the faster pop punk of My Everest and Ups and Downsizing, but they probably won’t find that sound here or on any future Swellers album, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Bands grow along with their members, and Diener wrestles with this very fact on the album’s closer and standout track, “Call It a Night,” when he sings, “You handed me a brick, special delivery, told me to live my dreams, and the older I get, I get tired of throwing it. I just want to build something.” That sentiment of trying to settle and find a place where you fit in, both as a person and as a band, runs throughout The Light Under Closed Doors, and by the end of the song’s bass-driven bridge, when Diener delivers a series of Swellers meta-lyrics, “I’ll find my way back home when I’m out of places to go. I’m done shoveling snow. But some of this will stay when the feeling fades away. When it all comes to light, we can call it a night,” you get the sense that he’s found it.
In a lot of ways, The Light Under Closed Doors seems like the capstone to an especially tumultuous portion of the Swellers’ career. It is the sound of four musicians growing into their sound and growing comfortable with their place in the scene. Here’s hoping it also serves as the cornerstone to whatever they want to build next.
SCORE: 8/10
Review written by: Troy Sennett
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