"Fire and Rain" by Acceptance, Wednesday, June 8, 2022

Acceptance's story about the band that called it quits before they realized made the band a legend. In 2014, Jesusfreakhideout posted their top "One Album Wonders," and Acceptance's Phantoms topped the list. According to lead singer Jason Vena, when he sat down with Billy Power on Urban Achiever Podcast in 2015, the lead singer recounted about how he had no idea the cult status the band then had in the scene. In various other interviews, Vena talked about how other bands, namely A Loss for Words and All Time Low inspired him to consider an Acceptance reunion. 

LAST SEASON OF THIS MASQUERADE. In 2005, Acceptance after their failed attempt at major label stardom, Vena took a job in Seattle outside of music. The band dissolved, some forming side projects with other musicians. Lead guitarist Christian McAlhaney talked with Josh Coats on Your PUSH Coach Podcast in 2020, talking about what made him successful in three bands and other projects. These projects includ Acceptance, Anberlin, and Loose Talk, a band he started with Anberlin's bassist Deon Rexroat. McAlhaney talks about working with two of the other musicians from Acceptance and working as a touring musicians for the runner-up of a musical reality show, Rockstar: Supernova, Dilana, before receiving a call to tour with Anberlin and ultimately become the band's integral fifth member. Once Anberlin broke up at the end of 2014, McAlhaney and Rexroat formed Loose Talk and he sent the boys in Acceptance an email putting the band members back into contact after ten years. The band met and slowly started to write new music which would become Colliding By Design, released in February of 2017.

WILL YOU LOOK IN MY EYES AS I STARE AT THE SUN? So did Colliding By Design cure the itch that Phantoms left fans? Was Jesusfreakhideout.com right to rank the band as the #1 One Album Wonder? Signing to Rise Records, the band received a lot of promotion--billboards, online marketing--anything to show that the band was back. Pop singers Nick Jonas and Demi Lovato even tweeted about the band's new album. The production team was the same: Acceptance and Aaron Sprinkle, this time in Nashville, not Seattle. But Colliding By Design was not Phantoms. It was a much more current-sounding pop-rock album. For me, it's taken a few years to sit with Acceptance's sophomore record. I realized that whatever they did would be the wrong record. They could write Phantoms II, and it wouldn't show any growth. They released Colliding which sounded like where the band would be had they stayed in the scene for twelve years. Listening to the two records back to back is a bit jarring. But in the five years since Colliding's release, I've come to appreciate the dark Acceptance, post-Cities Anberlin effects on the album. It's that dark, humid Northwest sound that make Phantoms so mysteriously beautiful and that sound is present on tracks like "Come Closer," "Goodbye," "Fire and Rain," and other places on the record as well. And seriously, how could we have gone twelve years (except for a few guest vocalist spots) without hearing Jason's vocals?


 

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