Evans Blue took the music industry by storm in 2006 with the release of their debut record, “The Melody And Energetic Nature Of Volume”. The bands ability to write hard rock tracks with substance won over many fans worldwide. The album ended up selling over 100,000 copies in the United States alone and made the band a staple of many radio stations. How does a band follow up such an impressive debut? Well in the case of Evans Blue the band writes another conceptual album with even more layers.

“The Pursuit Begins When This Portrayal Of Life Ends” is a complex album to say the least. The album revolves around three storylines that are interwoven throughout the tracks. Evans Blue, or more importantly lead singer Kevin Matisyn, have not officially said what these three storylines are but you get the feeling that they are all based on relationships. To add to the complexity of the album there is even a bit of politics thrown in the mix. If that isn’t enough to swallow the band throws in a cover of Tori Amos’ ‘Caught A Light Sneeze’ to show the diversity of their influences. With that all said you may never completely wrap your head around everything that is going on while you are listening to this album.

The albums complexity in no way takes away from the bands musicianship and ability to create great music. Evans Blue actually sound like a tighter unit on their sophomore release. This can be attributed to the band finally solidifying their line-up by adding drummer Davis H. This addition is apparent on the opener ‘In A Red Dress And Alone” as the song begins with some hard hits. This is an excellent way to start off as it gets the listeners attention, plus the song has one of the biggest hooks on the entire album.

As you get further into the album you notice that the Evans Blue does a good job of balancing heavy rockers with the slow melodramatic songs. This sets a nice pace and mood to the album. Heavier songs like ‘Dear Lucid, Our Time Is Right Now’, ‘My Damsel: A Confession To An Adversary’ and ‘Shine Your Cadillac’ use power to express their message. On The flip side the slower songs like ‘Fear ‘, ‘Kiss The Flag’ and ‘Pin-Up’ show the bands ability to convey emotion. The balance is most evident on the nine minute plus song “Painted”. The song starts out quite heavy and stays that way for the first five minutes before turning into an instrumental for the last four minutes.

After a nine minute epic, Evans Blue decides to end the album with ‘The Pursuit’, which also happens to be the first single. It is interesting that a band would make its first single the last song on the album. I think this is done to show how deep this record actually is and because it is the one song that essentially ties the album together. The songs final lyric, “The Pursuit Begins When This Portrayal Of Life Ends” relates directly back to the opening lyric of the album “Let’s Start It Over From The Beginning”. This is also evident by the sound of the projector starting and ending at each end of the album. When all is said and done you have a great album that stands on its own yet deserves further exploration to fully understand. Luckily the album sounds great so we don’t mind revisiting it over and over and over and over and over again.