When I first heard Five O'Clock Shadow's new recording, Time, I felt transported back to the funnest moments of the '90s. This music rocks, it grooves, it carries on delightfully. It draws on the energy of Bon Jovi and the 1980s rock guitar heros, the sincerity of the Eric Carmen-style power ballad, and the sense of humor of a band determined to rock out without falling into the sincerity abyss. What's refreshing is that this album doesn't feel like a museum piece. It feels like now.

The vibe of this record is at least as engaging as the individual songs. They're all good, they're all hummable toe-tappers. It's a tribute to longtime stalwarts Dan Lennon and Paul Pampinella as well as the rest of the current members that the band manages to straddle both worlds: the authenticity of those who were there and the fresh perspective of those who can transcend nostalgia. In my head, I categorized these songs for the vibes they triggered, like Someone Else as the song with the Jungle-Beat vibe, or cover track Time as the one with chords like Pearl Jam. Nothing on the Radio is the one for people who liked the '80s covers of '50s songs better than those originals. Come to Me is the slow dance song, and Today has vibes of Genesis, Bowie, and The Cars. To reduce these songs to those comparisons would be a disservice, however. I offer them in the spirit of dancing about architecture, not as the definitive word on what this music might mean to another listener.

Rock and roll is hard to do well a cappella. Covers too easily turn into fan service for the original songs, while original songwriting has nowhere to hide in the absence of actual guitars and drums. A good vocal rock band has to be all-in on the sounds and clever enough to write songs that stand up. Modern recording techniques help, but production values can't rock out for you. A band's got to figure that out for itself.

Five O'Clock Shadow has made the most of its Time and is well worth yours. Give it a spin and let yourself go for a minute.

Boston-born Five O'Clock Shadow (FOCS) has been rocking out since the 1990s. Early adopters of guitar pedal effects, their brand of a cappella — sometimes called "Man-Band" to distinguish them from the dancing-prancing Backstreets of the day — earned them a dedicated following. Countless gigs, membership changes, wild shifts in how people consume music, a few greys and a few decades later, and it's "suddenly" 2024. Time, indeed.

The album is an emotionally resonant collection of ten fully original compositions, an incredibly rare achievement made all the more praiseworthy by their craftsmanship. Each song has a journey, but they all find a common home in FOCS' signature sound. Count on Stadium rock tenors wailing over massive walls of distorted and harmonious sound. Octavised bass. Driving rock beats by vocal percussionist, Scott Cobban, keep the listener's fists pumping. Electronically enhanced rock with heart and brains. Who doesn't love that?

Ed Boyer mixes, Bill Hare masters, and Nick Gerard edits, but it's Caleb Whelden, a well-loved sound engineer in the a cappella community, who wears nearly all hats here, even if he shares a few. Producer, tracking engineer, lead on 40% of the album, composer or co-composer and arranger or co-arranger of all ten tracks. Damn. That's a workload. Thankfully it's also a unifying force, respecting the group's talents while bringing them together in common vision.

I honestly love all the lead voices in FOCS. But after multiple listens there are a few standout moments: I'm a huge fan of the fat, funky bass that kicks off Zig Zag. It has the same catchiness as Muse's Madness. Then when Jon Lavalley's rockin' tenor gets to the rich harmonies of the chorus … man, that's the stuff. It's placed to go right into Something in You. Moody Blues on steroids. But when Nothing on the Radio starts, we're almost in a pop boy band sound — only with a brilliant twist: the viewpoint is distinctly middle aged. The singer seeks real inspiration here. Plus, an a cappella chorus break in an a cappella song on an a cappella album? Come on! Easy to love! More? Sure. The soft rock vibe and satisfying chromatic motion on Come to Me. The hard rock vibe on Time. In the End's Irish-inspired tip of the hat to the joys of connection while the world burns. There's a lot to love.

More critically, between the arranging and studio work, there's not a lot of pure, patient empty space. That's a choice, but with the distortion, the mults, the vocal power, and the driving energy, some listeners may find themselves breathless. Just a few more actual audible breaths, a few actual moments of silence to dwell on the awesomeness of the prior moment, singular sounds taking up the whole of the space, that all would have been a lovely counterweight to the sonic wonders of FOCS' world.

That said, Time is an absolute pleasure to listen to and a true achievement in talent and originality. Highly recommended.

Notwithstanding the success and acclaim of folks like Pentatonix and Jacob Collier and säje and the like, an album of original pop a cappella, by a professional group of first-rate singers — let alone the gents of Five O'Clock Shadow, some of whom have nearly three decades in the group — should be a cause for great celebration.

When I tell you that the album has moments that evoke a wide variety of pop/rock/indie bands from the '80s through today — U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Radiohead, Green Day, Foo Fighters, Imagine Dragons, and yes, maybe even ABBA in one or two spots — it should give you the assurance you need to check it out, as there's a good deal of material here that will manage to sound fresh and original while also sounding familiar and comfortable.

And it all sounds great, which is surely to be expected from an album with a post-production team as noteworthy as this (editing by Nick Girard, mixing by Ed Boyer, mastering by Bill Hare).

If you're sensing a "but" coming, you're also not wrong. It's not a … er … big but, but I cannot lie that it exists nevertheless.

It's hard to pinpoint exactly what stops me from being absolutely gaga for this release while still liking it very much. First and foremost, the many and exceptional talents of Caleb Whelden are all over the album — in addition to producing the whole thing and tracking the vocals, he's credited with solo or shared composition credit AND arranging credit on all ten songs, and also solos on four of them.

As I've written here many times over the last 24 years, it's incredibly difficult for any one person to keep everything fresh and different and interesting and engaging — especially when a listener is taking in an album in its totality vs individual tracks (an increasing rarity today, I suspect, except perhaps for critics). And while Whelden's work is generally excellent, he does fall victim to this a bit — even right from the start, when the too-similar (and a bit too short) Someone Else and Something in You are showcased back to back, each with their mostly monophonic backing vocals and a ½ time "moment" either in the bridge or the beginning of the final choruses. Taken separately, each song is appealing, but in succession, they have a sameness that had me losing interest too early in the playlist.

Zig Zag followed by Coming Through are the best of what the album has to offer, as evidenced by my scores. The former introduces a new timbre in the solo voice, which is refreshing, and the choice to make more accented use of the background vocals — sometimes supplementing the lead with word harmonies, sometimes adding a 2nd or 3rd rhythmic layer, but mostly eschewing "pad chords" (at least not as ever-presently) — is an effective one that immediately made me sit up straighter and listen closer. Coming Through isn't actually so dissimilar to the opening two songs, but it's simultaneously tighter in its writing, but also a more fully realized composition (at nearly twice the length of Something in You) and thus a more satisfying musical journey.

The one other confounding issue that nagged at me through was one of energy. And having seen FOCS perform numerous times — including many of the gents featured here — I know that energy and charisma is not an area where the group is lacking. And yet, somehow, even with listens through multiple different types of sound equipment, that vitality is insufficient in the uptempo material, while the intensity is (mostly) missing in the slower/softer repertoire. There are certainly moments of irony in the lyrics of some of the songs, so a certain detached apathy might be totally appropriate now and again. I often wanted a song to lean forward and get in my face, but some combination of the performances and the processing had everyone playing it just a smidge too cool.

None of that changes where I started, however. If you've somehow never heard of FOCS, do yourself a favor and check them out. There's a lot to love here even with my quibbles and groups that have been this good for this long deserve our continued support, especially when they put out original music.