Jack's Mannequin: The Glass Passenger

Give most people cancer and a piano and they'll manage to find every single minor chord known to man. Leave them a few hours and you'll have a composition capable of convincing Charlie Bucket to hang himself on the bars of that chocolate factory before they even open.

Is this ever not the case for Jack's Mannequin. Despite being diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, front-man Andrew McMahon has delivered an album so full of life, hope and exuberance, that it's difficult to imagine that he was so close to making his family the proud owner of a brand new farm.

"The Glass Passenger" also marks an increasing shift for the band towards the style of previous McMahon project Something Corporate (albeit without the palm-muted guitars) with the album being chocked to the gills with fragile piano-led songs with a rocky inner-core. The focus is no longer on the understated as the band blast tracks with the might of Thor, often without warning.

Assisting the boys on the opening duo is New York singer-songwriter Stacy Clark (in an airy backing vocal capacity) as they go through the standard steps of a vehicular incident "Crashin'" and "Spinning". We could also rope in third track "Swim" if the incident were to be bridge bound. Thematically, they are very much in the vein of persistence in the face of adversity, an undercurrent present within the entire album. Inserted within a tempo usually reserved for songs about choking your ex-girlfriend, it's surprising how well the package slots together. Enlightening, encouraging, moderately intense and thoroughly engaging, it's enough to make you run out of adjectives beginning with the letter 'e'.

Contorting tracks also seems to be a honed skill for the band, as "Swim", "Caves" and "Suicide Blonde" manage to pull exhilarating twists which send the songs in completely unexpected directions. Marking the finale of the album (we don't count bonus tracks) "Caves" begins with the kind of vocal style that convinces you that the album is going to transmutate itself into a puppet theatre score about vampires. The orchestration soon follows suit, but true to "The Glass Passenger's" form, the build up is whipped away in favour of something completely unexpected.

While the lyricism isn't likely to bother any bands in the upper echelons of the trade, McMahon raises himself way beyond the standard fare of the pop-punk genre from which he was born. With sincerity, subtle intellect and impassioned verse he's come up with lines which will resonate amongst the target audience and stand up to a fair amount of scrutiny when stripped of their musical accompaniment "We wait in valleys while the clouds come in / We see no shadows, 'cause the shadows all there is / and we climb" puts a fine point on the crushing repetition of everyday life in the song "Bloodshot" whereas in "Caves" the subject of his cancer is dealt with more directly "I'm caught somewhere in between alive and living a dream / No peace, just clicking machines in the quiet of compazine."

Also interesting are the numerous instances of electronic flourishes which pop up every so often. While piano-led songs with electro licks may conjure images of Keane, we're a very long way from Eton. These flourishes are another step towards the diversity which Jack's Mannequin and even Something Corporate had failed to achieve. Although they're not quite there yet (The third quarter of the album has a few songs which are far too intangible) their sophomore album is almost a masterpiece in pop-punk balladry for those not too concerned with bolstering their Scrabble vocabulary.