Fundamentally Sound is like your favorite party band. They will bring the fun and the noise with a bevy of dance tracks, and when the party's over, you will leave knowing you had a good time. Occasionally, the group will branch out and surprise you with an inspiring, artistic experience, but the moments are few. These sentiments also describe the group's latest album, Crossing the Rubicon.

For clarity, I enjoy fun-filled music. The accompanied authenticity is needed for any performance, but a balance must exist for studio projects. I like a little sweet and spicy to my musical dishes. Show me that there are layers to your art.

In listening to Crossing the Rubicon, except for Welcome to My Parents' House and everything I wanted, the first half of the album feels a bit one note … mid to high tempo party tracks. Rock You, Butter, and Wildcard are not bad tracks, but there is little variance in their structure: pop-centric displays of big chords, quick percussion, and energized chorus sections. It becomes rinse and repeat, albeit a funky groove to help Wildcard, but not enough for a replay.

Now, Welcome to My Parents' House is full of character! Yes, the track is another dance bop, but I love the writing. The lyrics are downright hilarious, making the arrangement playful. The song gets a bit dramatized at times, especially near the bridge, but who doesn't love rooting for a group with personality? And the ad-libs are to die for!

everything I wanted is the group's first foray into a more subdued offering, which is a nice change, but leaves you yearning for different stylistic choices. I would have completely removed the track's percussion. It does a disservice to the song's drama.

The back half of Crossing the Rubicon tells a completely different story!

Coalesce is the project's best track. Each part is engaged and locked-in from production to the matching aura of both the lead and backing group. Movements feel well-designed with Rahul Ravi's solo being a star-studded affair. His mid-ranged and dulcet tone glide effortlessly over the backing track. The song features some of the best collective riffing you will hear and is near-perfect in dynamic execution.

Only Way Out is the album's most inventive offering. If you are not a fan of produced vocals, you will be after listening. The sci-fi and spacey feel is an alluring concept that will leave your mind floating to the top of your room. The bass, backing vocals, and lead are in divine harmony, elevating the artistic integrity of the entire experience to new heights not heard on the rest of the album.

The remaining tracks take care, Red Desert, and Alleviate are all winners in terms of lead delivery, polished overall track sounds, or smart artistic choices that know when to dial things back.

Crossing the Rubicon will send you on a journey. It is a subjective one dependent upon your tastes, but one rife with ups and downs. One thing is certain: Fundamentally Sound knows how to entertain.

If you've spent any time in the midwest collegiate a cappella community, there's a very good chance you've heard of Fundamentally Sound. This Wisconsin-based lower voice group has such a massive presence, both in terms of distance traveled and how they take the stage. Crossing the Rubicon is the latest installment from Fundamentally Sound. It has the elements of what makes the group an a cappella mainstay — filled with humor and a cappella invention, this album is a fun listen, but is missing that spark that would truly make the album great.

The first sentence of Rock You sets the perfect tone for the start of this release: "All I ever wanna do is set the temperature inside the room". Niko Tutland's arrangement is fun and bouncy, filled with earworm rhythms and cool color chords. Butter is a very classic boy band jam. Wildcard is a fun r&b jam. These tracks and their infectious energy are what keeps audiences coming to FS shows. However, the songs all seem to be missing something. The impact moments feel very thin. The chords don't have the full spectrum of lows, mids, and highs. Some of this might be from arranging, some might be from the recording mix, but the result is underwhelming. In an auditorium of cheering fans, this wouldn't be a problem as the energy of the room would fix the issues. However, in the isolation of the studio, these tracks fall a little flat.

Welcome to My Parents' House is the exception that proves the rule. There's a RARB review that already exists to cover this track, but it almost deserves to be covered again. Grant Schwab arranged and solos on this piece and corrects many of the album issues. The chords are bigger, the big moments hit harder. This track is collegiate a cappella humor at its finest. From members interjecting dog barks and a falsetto imitation of mom, this track will leave you in stitches.

Once we leave the early tracks, we get to the music that will make you stay and listen to the group. These tracks sit in the space of r&b and electronic styles of music. Coalesce plays a lot with auxiliary sounds and secondary effects such as reverb and digital filters. Rahul Ravi's solo is smooth and soulful, though the whole track is so smooth. However, there's a flaw in this song. The intent of this piece is to be big and powerful, but the group never hits the climactic pinnacle that they are striving for. There are soft dynamics, there are middle dynamics, but the loud dynamics and big hits are on par with the middle dynamics. This piece then bleeds directly into take care, which has many of the same flaws. The group has all the pieces and knows how to deliver the biggest highs and the softest lows, but fails to deliver consistently.

Crossing the Rubicon feels like it's missing something behind the scenes. The arrangements are solid. The soloists are talented frontmen. The songs are well-selected to be diverse but cohesive. The group stays in its wheelhouse while also exploring new music. I want to love everything about this album, but I'm underwhelmed by the overall product. It's missing that final spark that makes the largest moments more exuberant and the softest moments more intense; Fundamentally Sound has found it in the past, but I think I'll be waiting for the next album to see if they find it again.

Great scholastic a cappella groups set high bars that they continue to improve upon even with continual new iterations of the group. Fundamentally Sound, one such group, consistently delivers good recordings alongside some exceptionally memorable tracks and singles. The group's latest album, Crossing the Rubicon, meets that high floor, but relatively few of the tracks rise to lofty expectations, particularly because of a monotony between some of the tracks and a deficit of loud dynamics.

The first half of the album features a lot of songs where soloists sing in falsetto for extended portions. Though the songs are different in style and lyrics, they nonetheless begin to bleed together — maybe this would not happen if Butter and Wildcard were placed elsewhere in the song order. Sarat Sagaram sounds good as a soloist on everything i wanted, but I wonder if that arrangement would have been more successful if performed without a soloist in a slightly more choral style as suggested by the background parts.

Though none of the other first five songs have mistuned chords or musical mistakes, they pale in comparison to the standout pizazz and charisma of Welcome to My Parents' House. I have already written at length about the single's spot-on campy humor, Grant Schwab's inspired arranging and solo performance, and the group's impressive musicality. Crossing the Rubicon would hugely benefit from another upbeat and/or humorous track on the album like this one.

The tide of the album turns at Coalesce, helmed by the smooth, warm vocal stylings of Rahul Ravi and backed by the group's incredible execution of the atmospheric arranging style of Michael Khor Eng Hoe. But even this track and the others in the back half never quite reach the loud catharsis we expect, which sounds perhaps like a mixture of arranging and post-production decisions. Only Way Out also emerges from the pack because of the effective use of post-production filters on the background voices and vocal percussion to emulate Madeon's synthesized sounds and create movement in the sonic space. Alleviate comes to the closest to a full forte moment, which makes sense given it was the end of Fundamentally Sound's 2023 ICCA set, but even this song's climatic moment could have been louder, fuller, more intense. And yet, that critique shouldn't take away from the group's stellar singing of alum Lee Stovall's sharp arrangement and Rahul Ravi again delivering a stand-out solo performance.

The final track We've Become features a trio singing a 46-second excerpt from the group's acclaimed, dynamic single Silhouette, which won RARB's 2020 single of the year. While the singing is excellent, especially with the reverb, I wonder why it was included on this album? Maybe the track has an internal meaning for the three featured singers or for a generation of the group, but that context is lost to us as listeners.

I offer these nit-picky critiques because I know this group's capabilities. I hope that future releases reclaim the creative inspiration of the group's storied recording history.