Songs such as “One Summer Last Fall” and “In the Summer's When You Really Know” are casually epic, spinning off-the-cuff observations into nostalgic and romantic testaments. On the former, Schwarzenbach manages to instill lyrics like “Kid, what went wrong/We had it all, now it's all gone/I blew my mind out/Now it's your turn to find out” with an undercurrent of hope. And the way he spikes lines throughout the song with the word “kid” serves the same function of encouraging a sense of community between artist and listener, as Bruce Springsteen's “sir”s do on Nebraska.
But by track six, the record begins to lose focus; the great, unexpected concept album we think we're listening to runs out of steam and reverts to a fine but typical punk-pop record. The awkward, vaguely country “Empty Picture Frame” signals a change and leads into riff-heavy conventional punk material that diverges from the earlier songs in both form and content. Four Cornered Night doesn't recover its unique character until the last track, a daring piano ballad called “All Things Good and Nice.” Courting disaster at every turn, Schwarzenbach at first sounds like a reformed punk kid who's been turned on to All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten and Chicken Soup for the Soul, but the song walks the tightrope between sentimentalism and soulfulness with stunning aplomb. What could very easily be too saccharine to swallow instead comes off as brave and inspirational. “All Things Good and Nice” also contains a lyric of the year candidate in this perhaps unintentional punk-rock rebuke of the aggressively solipsistic “heavy” music and rap-metal hordes currently running roughshod over rock culture: “Some will say the truth is not so plain/But don't confuse the truth with your pain.”
