Math wiz and multi-instrumentalist John Ondrasik's third album under his rather misleading Five For Fighting rubric shows that he's lost little of the cranky ire that he unleashed on American Town, but this time his targets are a little closer to home. He skews faithless friends and bad habits on the tetchy opening track "NYC Weather report," oddly borrowing from both Guns N' Rose's "Paradise City," and Barbara Streisand's "People" to hammer his ornery point home, before training his sights on the human life span, fleeting relationships, and even Disneyland. But it isn't until "Girlfriends and Angels," that he shows his real brilliance, imagination and grit; Ondrasik finds the exact place where the Beach Boys intersects with the Velvet Underground and plants himself in that spot, spewing out his own hard won romantic philosophies, proving once again that the hunter does indeed get captured by the game. More ribald, sonically inventive, and lyrically edgy, The Battle For Everything, shows that Ondrasik's combative days may be behind him. --Jaan Uhelszki
