“Go On, Give Me the Bad News” – This track has a simple, yet catchy rhythm. It doesn’t try to overtake the singing, yet the percussion and guitar riffs, in the calming melody they create together, will steal the focus, unless one is listening intently. For those who want an easy driving tune (or to use in a movie), the track lends itself rather well to the role. However, if one likes lyrics or likes only the overall effect of lyrics and instruments, they’ll be somewhat disappointed. The singing, while clear, concise and complementary of the music, isn’t served well by the actual lyrics. The words seem to be trying to tell a story or evoke a particular emotion, but without a beginning, an ending, or even context. Perhaps the connection could be better made with a music video, but the faint baseball announcer quotes in between the riffs also did not really make sense. All in all, the song is an easy listen, but the lyrics make it seem a bit empty and thus, forgettable. (2.81, B-)

“No Intent to Return” – The ballad-like percussion initially seems like it will steal all focus with its prominence…and then the singing starts. The story being told is short, simple, and interesting, made all the more so by the fact that its being sung at the same time with male and female voices. This allows the listeners imagination to have complete autonomy when imagining the story’s protagonist. The music does its job of giving exclamation points to the stanzas and filling in the beats between them, but the music really falls by the wayside, in a good way, to hear the story being told. The tune lends itself well for either driving (with its percussion), or for intent listening (with its lyrics). Overall, this is a very good track. (4.00, A)

“Sleep When You Are Dead” – In this track, the instrumentation takes center stage with a bombastic, if generic, beat. Unfortunately, the robust beats and rhythms come at the cost of the singer, who is drowned out whenever the chorus plays out. Worse, when the music recedes back into the background, the singer’s voice is on reverb, which continues to make the lyrics hard to make out unless played again. If the lyrics told a coherent story, it would be worth doing so, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Overall, this wasn’t a great effort, and the track should be skipped in favor of much better music in the rest of the album. (1.36, D-)

Album Overall – The album is an eclectic mix of instruments, styles, and singing. There seems to be a track for any occasion, be it dancing, driving, a movie, or just intent listening for the message. The first track, “The Age of Wonder”, has excellent, and very catchy, instrumentals that enhance the wonder (no pun intended) evident in the singing, and makes an excellent opener to the album. Lasorda seems to experiment with every track (while still ensuring they all maintain a connection to each other with a signature unique to the group), sometimes changing the vocals, the percussion, their synthesizer, etc. or some combination thereof. Sometimes this works very well, like with the aforementioned opening track or “No Intent to Return”, and sometimes it can produce a dud like “Sleep When You Are Dead”. At the very least, most of these tracks will be very catchy to listen to. One should be careful not to play all the tracks at once, since some of them can seemingly run into another without the listener noticing, but they work very well individually.