In music there are often projects loaded with ambition and good ideas that, despite all the roadblocks, get pulled off with impressive solidarity. The Rentals’ Songs About Time is certainly one of these projects.  In the newest release from the famed moog rockers, The Rentals head honcho Matt Sharp juggles around various media formats, spanning photography and video in addition to music. Now that the so-called “Dawn of the Digital Age” has come and gone, artists are constantly trying to give more to their releases — whether it’s a live DVD packaged with an album, or putting songs online for free download. At the same time, we’re now seeing a return to vinyl, and CDs are coming packaged in card stock covers that fold out like tiny little record sleeves. In dealing with this shift in the industry, Sharp believes the key is trying to land somewhere in the middle, saying, “When the balance is correct they all seem to inspire the other and feed off each other.” While one could argue that seeking the best of both worlds might hinder the final product from reaching maximum potential, Songs About Time is a case where the balance helps each of the formats keep its heads above water.

Despite this difficult balancing act, Sharp describes the process of creating Songs About Time as “fun.” Still, he clearly also wants to create an album that is a work of art, and that desire shows in the new songs. While the new tracks keep a lot of the same instruments and techniques as their previous work, they also explore more advanced content and structure. The work is clearly more mature than their earlier efforts. And though the newly mature sound may take you off the dance floor in some instances, the tracks are delivered with a peaceful, comfortable tone that just wasn’t present in the past. For fans, it will be a change that is surprising to hear, but tempered by a black and white photo book and and a 52-part series of videos.

The videos of the collection, Films About Weeks, are stylistically varied. Some of them are artistic four-minute shorts of various urban landscapes draped in multilingual voiceovers, while others resemble documentaries or home videos that show the songwriting and recording process. As a whole, the film portion of the project is presented like a surrealist, less-grainy version of Don’t Look Back but  instead or being shot over the course of a two-week tour, Films About Weeks spans an entire year with a new video for every week of 2009.  It works as a diary — that much is certain — but it’s too fragmented to stand as a single body.  It’s not quite a musical documentary. On the other hand, it would be misleading, and a large disservice, to describe it as music video.  It is the ambiguity of Films About Weeks that keeps the ideas in it fresh and open to curiosity.

Still, there are a lot of quirks in Songs About Time that could be taken as choices stemming from pretentiousness. In other instances, using multiple languages in songs and videos, and releasing a body of songs over three EPs might have easily distracted from the music and turned off listeners. Strangely enough, however, Matt Sharp chalks these choices up to creating clarity. Explaining the use of different languages, Sharp says, “I thought that it would be a nice thing to have some way to mark the change of seasons so we weren’t in just this one place the whole time…Oh, now we’re in the Japanese season, or we’re only a couple weeks until we start the French season.” When defending the decision to split Songs About Time into three different releases, Sharp simply says, “It was a way to have an ending every so often.”  For him, the songwriting process is allowed to reboot when the end of one installment stops and time is allotted for the next to begin.

And, oddly enough, when you look at the manner in which the Songs About Time project is being released to the world — digital streaming audio and video, MP3 downloads of each EP, and online slide shows for the accompanying photos of the project titled Photographs About Days — it makes perfect sense to release the album as a fragmented series of works: “There’s no need to think in terms of 10 or 12 songs as a form anymore,” Sharp explains. “We wouldn’t have been able to do this project two or three years ago!”

It’s undeniable that The Rentals are focused on creating something they wanted to hear, something they wanted to see, and something they wanted to touch. They wanted to create something great, and they’re doing it the way any artist would want: on their own terms. Those terms will come to fruition in March when The Rentals start shipping the physical release of Songs About Time. It will be presented in the form of CD or vinyl copies of the three EPs, a black and white photo book entitled Photographs About Days, a DVD copy of Films About Weeks, and an undeveloped roll of black and white film, for the buyer to use and post photos to The Rentals’ website. It is the type of jam-packed release that is typically reserved for 25-year anniversary remastered box sets. But given the attitude of the rest of the project, it only seems to make sense to make the physical release as ambitious as everything else.