I meant to fin­ish this review before the release date of the album but I got side­tracked. Haven’t heard of Paper Route? Shame on you. If you have, you know that their highly antic­i­pated debut full-length album Absence released last week. I’ll do my best to describe this piece of mag­nif­i­cence to you.

The record begins with a kalei­do­scope of sound and tex­tured beats enti­tled “Enemy Among Us” call­ing the only ref­er­ence to the album title. “Wish” com­bines the best of rough gui­tar, solid piano sounds, and synths. “Carousel” is quite the sin­gle with a great hook and unfor­get­table sound. The next track, “Good Inten­tions” starts off dis­tant and slowly begs you closer to your stereo; not to men­tion a heart­break­ing theme. For a bit of a throw­back sound, oddly-named “Tiger Teeth” pro­vides some more great and catchy synth sounds.  From the first 10 sec­onds, you know “Be Healed” will be stuck in your head tom­r­row and it’s follow-up “Last Time” has over­whelm­ingly pow­er­ful vocals and perfect-toned lyrics. “No Sud­den Rev­e­la­tions” with­out a doubt calls hard­core fans right back to the ‘sounds’ of the A Thrill of Hope EP with a breath of fresh air. The next track is the only track any­body has any excuse to skip over a song on the record. Although, after the ini­tial warm-up I still like “Gut­ter” quite a bit, I can see how every­body might not be into the rugged sound. Lyri­cally, I’m pretty sure “Are We All For­got­ten” is my favorite. The words “don’t you break my heart, again” have to rese­n­ate with any­one who has a soul. “Lover’s Anthem” brings some pretty good string sounds, how­ever it’s prob­a­bly the least memer­able track on the record. Per­haps that’s because it’s fol­lowed up by favorite new track on the record (“All We All Fogot­ten” is also on the EP released last year). Check it out below.

I’ve always found it hard find­ing an artist who matches the pro­duc­tion value of a main­stream artist and the pure tal­ent of an inde­pen­dent artist. Paper Route is one of the few. Hands down, this is the best record released thus far in 2009. Astound­ing lyrics, phe­nom­e­nal sounds, and over­all epic songs. Every sec­ond of this album is good. This is not one to miss.

“Dance On Our Graves”

I hear some­thing out there callin’ my name
No mat­ter where I turn, it all looks the same
I never sleep at night, I just stay up and wait
But the burn­ing in my blood never came

(Will I know it)
Will I know it when I see it?
(Will I know it)
Will I know it when you’re here?

I need you now, I need you more than ever before

I know that where I am is not who I should be
The devil takes my hand and says, ‘Child, come with me.‘
My body shiv­ers and aches; I can’t break free
Why do the things I hate come so naturally?

When we see the light when we’re going home
We’ll dance on our graves with our bod­ies below
We’ll sing, ‘Glory’ and ‘Hallelujah’

©2009 Universal/Motown

Want to lis­ten to the whole album once for free and buy high-quality mp3s for $5.99? Too much? How about unlimted full-length streams of the entire album for $0.60! It’s all here.