Jack's Mannequin

Andrew McMahon is a likeable frontman who has spread his tunes between two bands, Something Corporate and Jack’s Mannequin. The latter is a power-pop confection, and it’s unfortunate that Everything In Transit sees its release at back-to-school time instead of the beginning of summer. The songs, packed with pathos and big builds, are ripe for soundtracking teenage summertimes, and all the huge self-discoveries, forged friendships, fleeting romances, and trips to the mall that those days entail.

McMahon is in the midst of a battle with leukemia, so he’s the rare young frontman who is unhesitatingly forgiven for “life or death” melodrama. He’s a fighter, but he’s fragile, too, and he lays himself bare in his lyrics, repeatedly returning to a place of hope and camaraderie. Musically, though, Everything In Transit is too general and too sugary to create much gravitas independent of its sad backstory. Clearly, Jack’s Mannequin aspires for more than pop escapism, but this seems to be what McMahon and company do best --and they do it pretty well.

“Miss Delaney,” for instance, is a piano-driven pop sing-along that will appeal to fans of Fountains of Wayne, and also tips its hat to The Beach Boys. The piano is prominent throughout, and often takes the songs to places that listeners may be hesitant to admit. (Could “I’m Ready,” for instance, almost be a Vanessa Carlton song? Yes.) The front-end is considerably stronger than the last half, which loses the contagious thread begun by the breezy “Holiday From Real” and the driving “The Mixed Tape.” - Adam McKibbin

If Andrew McMahon is the Ben Folds of Something Corporate, then his side project Jack's Mannequin is his Fear of Pop, his opportunity to step out of the group and try something different. Except in McMahon's case, it isn't so much fear of pop as much as an embrace of pop, since he sheds the loud guitars and punky overtones of his main band for a sunny, unabashedly tuneful Californian pop on Jack's Mannequin's debut album, Everything in Transit. In truth, it's not all that far removed from his contributions to Something Corporate, which were also tightly written and tuneful, but it sounds truer to his artistic inclinations than either of SC's studio albums, since underneath its guise as a loose concept album about a year of turbulent relationships on Venice Beach, it's a full-blown singer/songwriter piano-pop album. More than ever, on Everything in Transit McMahon sounds like the heir to Ben Folds' wise-ass interpretation of Joe Jackson, but McMahon isn't as cynical or goofy as Folds. His humor is sardonic and low-key, plus he's more concerned with affairs of the heart. Although he relies a little bit too heavily on first-person narratives, he has a keener eye for character and behavior than his emo peers, and he's a better tunesmith, too, not just content to write hooks, but taking the time to let the music build and breathe. With producer Jim Wirt, McMahon has given Everything in Transit an appropriately colorful, even cinematic, scope and, thanks to drums provided by Tommy Lee (who proves here that he's a more versatile drummer than he ever did in Mötley Crüe), it also has strong backbone. So the album has momentum, but it's as sweetly melancholy as a fading summer, yet not nearly as transient as that, either. It really shouldn't work -- it's a conceptual power pop album, delivered by an emo songwriter, backed by an aging metalhead, and co-produced by a guy who gave Hoobastank hits -- but the result is one of the more pleasant surprises of 2005. It's good enough that it makes you hope that McMahon makes Jack's Mannequin his full-time band. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide