Compilation albums in principle have the potential to be successful. When you consider projects such as BOCA or BOHSA, the theme is the best of the best at certain scholastic levels. Projects such as SING by the Contemporary A Cappella Society, in my opinion, honors the most innovative, indie, or stylistically unique tracks in the vocal arts community. Every compilation album should have a hook to fall back upon. Unfortunately, the hook for Best of BYU A Cappella Club 2022 gets a bit lost at times.

For starters, yes, one could view the hook for this compilation as being that all the featured groups are affiliated with Brigham Young University. Easy. Done. Let's go home! Well, even if that were the case, one would expect at a minimum, similar technical components as it relates to production work. No such conformity is present. Instead, Best of BYU A Cappella 2022 functions as a musical grab bag, where you are rolling the dice on what you will hear next.

To acknowledge the good, there are indeed some tasty morsels on this release. There are a number of tracks that are strong interpretations of mostly pop offerings. 85 puts forth a great deal of personality with its gritty at times lead vocals, colorful backing sound, and animated rhythmic section. At the halfway point of the album, What They'll Say About Us offers a knockout and unmatched vocal performance, with its soothing duet, captivating emotional and dynamic variance, and pristine harmonies. Be My Eyes is the joyful light on the album with its effervescent solo delivery, balanced arrangement that wonderfully highlights the song's highs and lows, and the group's smooth collective vocal delivery. Speechless is perhaps the album's best display of conviction as you feel each vocal part from bass to leads lean into what it is being sung. The intensity feels almost effortless. And the entire project goes out on an absolute high with My Universe. The track is a strong representation of a modern pop sound with incredible leads, creativity throughout the arrangement's entirety, and a pulse that steadily drives the song's energy. Additionally, each of these previously mentioned tracks boasts a high degree of production work, allowing the arrangement and vocals to shine without having to strain the listener's ears to process what is being delivered.

One of my major critiques of this compilation album is the lack of consistency in production. The vocal percussion is especially noticeable, as some tracks have a crisper, more polished sound, versus others that sound frankly, amateur. Fine-tuning the percussive mixes across the board would have helped a lot. Some of the other technical faults range from overpowering low ends to needing a better balance between parts. Concerns that are more subjective include issues with diction, dynamics, and often choral stylings on pop tracks.

While the spirit of the project is indeed there, a more unified production effort would help this project go even further. Best of BYU A Cappella Club 2022 features some worthwhile arrangements and musical moments. The album just needs a little more oomph to help it reach its destination.

BYU hosts quite possibly one of the largest a cappella communities at a single university in the United States, if not the world. With eleven currently active groups in the BYU A Cappella Club and other groups independent of the club, it's apparent there is an honest attempt to find something for everyone. Every year, this overarching club releases an album, the Best of BYU A Cappella. This year's collection features seventeen songs from nine different groups. It's a challenge to make broad sweeping statements about the album as it is not all the product of one group. There are no generalizations that will impact all groups. However, the main two themes that I've found for my thoughts center around texture and overall impact of the music.

Let's start with talking about textures. Much like how multiple voice parts exist to help fill space and provide depth and vibrancy to chords rather than one individual line, different textures can exist to help shape the music and help draw the listener towards certain elements. Much like synthesizer pads, sustained notes underneath parts add texture and help fill some of the silence that tends to exist following only one part. For example, Capital L tends to only employ one texture underneath the soloist at any one time. As you listen to the track, you'll notice entire chunks of verse where the whole group sings the same rhythm all together, creating a blocky chord structure. While the song is cute, the sound is incredibly thin. Even simple changes — adding small backing harmonies to the chorus or keeping basic rhythmic patterns while adding underlying sustained chords — would go a long way towards keeping the listener's attention and making the overall music more interesting.

A lack of impact also affects a large number of these tracks. Consider the track Attention. This track has minimal dynamics across the board. If an overall track is like a mountain range with peaks and valleys of dynamics, this track is a plateau. It is incredibly flat. This is most apparent when looking at the choruses; all three feel like carbon copies of each other. The notes, rhythms, and even backing syllables are all the same. However, more importantly, they are all the same dynamic. This is incredibly problematic, as it shows that the group has done little to tell an overall story to the song. There is no climax to the music, no peak to the emotions. If this is a song of scorned love, then there should be emotions to show that. At no point is there a feeling that the soloist has evolved through their story, resulting in a sort of monotony devoid of any feeling.

Even with the missteps, there are some shining moments throughout this release. All You Need to Know is one of the most complete tracks. The first mostly choral verse does a good job of setting the stage for the song before entering a more electronic sound. The textures vary throughout the different parts, leaving little pieces to unpack with each listening. There's still some work that could be done in making more contrast between the highs and lows, but this track is mostly what I would hope to hear. It's sonically satisfying, texturally satisfying, and overall a complete product.

With such a large body of work coming from so many sources, it's hard to make large sweeping statements about each group's best and worst traits, especially with some groups providing a singular song as a snapshot of their total abilities. Thus, it falls more upon the listener to use this as an opportunity to explore what each group is truly about. Further, for groups on the album, this review becomes an opportunity to learn. Compare the individual tracks against my comments and see if they fit or not. Listen to each song to determine which track you think is the best and why. Compilation albums are a great way to perform as well as to learn, and this album can be both of these tools.

Best of BYU A Cappella Club 2022 is a respectable effort to compile the work of many a cappella groups under one project. On one hand, the album is surprisingly coherent and consistent, given it is composed of nine different BYU a cappella groups over seventeen tracks. On the other hand, most of the tracks have the same persistent issues that build up and add excessive homogeneity to what should've been a celebration of many different sounds.

Let me start by addressing low-hanging fruit: it is very important to not ruin a good thing with one-off novelties — they distract much more than add. This may sound obvious, but then I ask why the album seems so riddled with these moments. Kings and Queens has a vocal percussion interlude that feels half-mixed to sound electronic and lands directly into an uncanny valley. Blinding Lights's interlude of Take On Me seems like it was added as a gimmick to reference the '80s nostalgia in The Weeknd's song, but the two songs simply don't match together in execution and it only detracts from the vibe of an otherwise solid track on the album. Also, why is there a banana peel slip percussion effect in the middle of the song? This choice comes up again on Heroes (We Could Be), despite being recorded by a different group. Think About Things also has a vocal percussion issue that pops up, with a strange "whoop" sound as a snare replacement that sounds both too loud and disconcerting.

There are deeper structural issues besides one-off distractions, however. The balance of parts is all over the place across almost all groups — tracks often lack musical foundation due to peculiar root inversions and voices that are stacked seemingly without thought to the exposed dominant harmonies, such as on Love Someone. The soloists across the board aren't particularly weak but they often feel mismatched to their respective songs. Even worse, sometimes they seem like good picks but then make strange (often over-exaggerated) choices to sound more like the original performing artist, and then they distract from their own good qualities. Dynamic contrast is also lacking on most songs — there are louds and softs, sure, but most of these feel like shifts on a volume dial rather than actual changes in intensity from the singers. I hate to keep harping on vocal percussion as well, but even momentary questionable choices aside, much of it generally sounds underperformed and undermixed. Attention, for example, has a solid foundation, but the lack of evolution of its arrangement combined with a repetitive percussion backing results in an eventually boring track.

If I were to guess the intent of the previously mentioned peculiar choices, they were seen as a means of adding interest to these songs. The problem with this method is that gimmicks, especially on repeat listens, lose their luster really fast and make the end result sound messy while not actually solving the issue of stagnation. Solving the aforementioned structural issues, however, can provide the desired interest far more effectively — naturally providing interest and entertainment that reinforce repeat listenability, too.

The best songs on this project dodge both of these types of issues simultaneously. Driver's License isn't particularly daring but the core balance and pacing are still solid and there aren't any major oddities or distractions holding it back. All You Need to Know has heavier mixing along the lines of Blinding Lights, but it is far more polished in its execution, and the soloists carry strong dynamic contrast to keep the song from stalling.

Compilation albums of this size also risk bloat. This can be solved with song choices that accent each group's strengths and compensates for weaknesses. The consistency of these distractions, combined with song choice that doesn't seem to showcase each group's strengths, makes them feel too same-y by the end. And when the groups feel too same-y, seventeen songs becomes a very long album and makes me wish each group was limited to just one song.

BYU clearly has a very loaded a cappella scene with a lot of very talented singers. Best of BYU A Cappella Club 2022 at least showcases this with its sheer scale and scope. It also feels, however, as if BYU's showcased groups are restraining their unique strengths and identities on this compilation. I'd like to see the club make better use of its innate diversity on its next project, and work together for a higher standard of polish and growth as well.