“Infinite” by House of Heroes, Sunday, August 25, 2024

After releasing Ten Months in 2001, a punk album under the name No Tagbacks, House of Heroes signed to Vanishing Point Records and rebranded to the name House of Heroes with the release of their first album, What You Want Is Now in 2003 under the new moniker. They signed with Gotee Records and released House of Heroes in 2005. The band recorded three more albums with Gotee and its rock imprint Mono Vs. Stereo became one of the biggest bands in Christian Rock with their 2008 record The End Is Not the End. In 2014, the band released their first independent release since 2003, the EP Smoke. Then in 2016, the band released Colors on BadChristian Music.

WHEN I TURN MY EAT TO AUGUST WIND, I CAN STILL HEAR THE MAGIC. The lead singer of House of Heroes, Tim Skipper,  has described their association with Christian Rock as a kind of “straddling the line” between the Christian industry and the general market. Christian rock critics such as Jesusfreakhideout.com, highly regarded the band with most of their albums receiving high scores and often making best of the year lists and most anticipated album of the coming year lists. The only band that seems comparable at the time for these critics is Anberlin, though House of Heroes never enjoyed the crossover success of Anberlin. The Christian rock critics loved both of these bands for their subtlety in their Christian messaging. But House of Heroes’ 2016 album Colors was controversial due to the album's lyrical shift away from spiritual themes and even near some close calls with profanity. Skipper said on the BadChristian Podcast when promoting Colors that not all of the members of the band identified as Christian and that they wanted their listeners to interpret their lyrics however they wanted to.

EVERY LITTLE SOUND ON A DUBBED CASSETTE HIT YOU IN THE HEART LIKE AN ARROW. House of Heroes’ 2014 EP Smoke is a kind of wrapping up of their old sound and a looking forward to their new lyrical style on their 2016 album Colors. Many of House of Heroes’ songs throughout their career tell stories. Colors is an album of interconnected stories. Today’s song, “Infinite,” is the last song on their Smoke EP. The lyrics tell a story about a love interest that took place years ago. Describing the “summer just melting away riding in your brother’s Camero” with tapedecks, cigarettes, and a house “buried under a mall” the lyrics evoke a sense of longing for the past. The lyrics sound similar to a line in the 1999 novel and 2012 film The Perks of Being a Wallflower. The chorus of the song declares: “Yeah, we are infinite!” In the novel, the scene in The Perks of Being a Wallflower describes Charlie with his friends Patrick and Sam as they drive through a tunnel, windows down listening to Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide.” In the epistolary novel, Charlie writes about the feeling of being infinite several times as he discovers a new world of music, film, and the arts.  The film, however,  depicts the scene at the end, just before the credits, playing the song “Heroes” by David Bowie. Perhaps the resemblance between a popular two-year-old movie and an indie rock song is purely coincidental. Maybe the film’s message seemed too contradictory to the band’s fan base. Maybe it was the plausible deniability needed to steer clear of a lawsuit. Maybe it was a band getting caught liking something too popular. Whatever it was, “Infinite” can stand on its own, creating its own world in the same way that the book and the movie, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, capitalize on the feeling that in a single moment, youth can last forever.

Read the lyrics on Genius.