Tuesday, June 28th, 2011
Purchase this album on: Amazon | iTunes | Official site
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Songs are just collections of tones and rhythms, books are just lengthy arrangements of letters and spaces, and films are nothing more than moving images synchronized with sounds. It’s all stupidly simple, yet our hearts swell for crescendos and we weep at the end of Steel Magnolias. Why do we care and where is the line drawn between what moves us and what doesn’t? It’s all so baffling, but Taking Back Sunday are here to help!
With their self-titled album, the band provides a great example of entertainment that fails to make an impact. Having been among the frontrunners of the misconstrued “emo” craze of the early 2000’s, Taking Back Sunday are no strangers to writing music with the aim of being relatable. What they may not be familiar with is missing that mark so thoroughly. After writing two albums (Tell All Your Friends and Where You Want to Be) of pitch-perfect pop punk tunes for heartbroken Myspace users, the band swapped emotion for innovation, twisting their sound with touches of rugged alt-rock swagger on the fantastic Louder Now and the less fantastic New Again. Here, on their eponymous fourth record, they seem caught between feigned emotion and innovation, landing in a limbo where they gain no traction no matter how furiously they spin their wheels.
And oh, how they spin. Track after track, the band try to salvage their own songs with one bright idea or another, even going so far as to lift the entire aesthetic of sister band Brand New’s Daisy for “El Paso”, the album’s thrashy opener. In the end, it all seems disjointed: half-baked verses sticking awkwardly out of either side of jumbo-sized choruses that pop up as predictably as pictures of cats on the internet, but with only a fraction of the enjoyment. Adam Lazzara’s lyrics don’t exactly shine either. His snarky brand of melodrama has been compressed into oblivion, making most of the lyrics on the album either woefully ho-hum (“I’m sorry, come back”), curiously preoccupied with Christian imagery, or vaguely nonsensical.
All this disappointment would be much easier to swallow if Taking Back Sunday was a complete disaster. Instead, gleams of what the album could have been shine through the dreck like glimpses of a cake in a dumpster, wasting its potential among the trash. “Best Places To Be a Mom” could be heralded as the second coming of classic Taking Back Sunday were it not sandwiched between two totally mediocre tracks. “You Got Me” is just bursting with energy and even the aforementioned “El Paso” has its charms. It makes one wonder at what point the sessions that spawned these high points went haywire and produced the rest of the album.
Wednesday, June 1st, 2011
By Alex Waage
By this album on: iTunes | Official Store
Find this artist on: Facebook | Twitter | Website
In 2005, Death Cab for Cutie’s pop melancholia wriggled it’s way into the hearts and mix tapes of the masses with the release of their fifth album, Plans. Gorgeous though the album was, it served as a small step away from the “under the raincloud of despair” mood that would hang over their music. In sacrificing this emotional edge, Death Cab overcompensated for the loss with Narrow Stairs, an edgier record comprised of 11 attempts to remain interesting. Like Narrow Stairs, Death Cab’s newest record, Codes and Keys, tries to expand the band’s sonic palette. Luckily for the listener, the band isn’t trying quite so hard this time around. Where Narrow Stairs had gratuitous 8-minute jams (“I Will Possess Your Heart”) and half-hearted attempts at Pet Sounds aplomb (“You Can Do Better Than Me”), Codes and Keys is unified by one central idea: atmosphere.
From the delayed guitars and processed vocals of “You Are a Tourist” to the grand finale of “Stay Young, Go Dancing”, the record is soaked in production flourishes that lend it texture and provide a crutch for otherwise weak songs like “Some Boys”. On Codes and Keys’ first half, these atmospherics run the risk of feeling like unnecessary and self-indulgent attempts to bring something new to the Death Cab formula. It’s not until the glowing “Unobstructed Views” that the ambient sounds are pushed to the foreground and given room to breath and bloom. From that point on, the production becomes more subtle, working behind the scenes to give fairly typical Gibbard-penned fare like “Portable Television” a few sonic sprinkles.
Though Codes and Keys runs laps around its predecessor, it still trips up in rough patches where the songwriting just isn’t up to the par set by Transatlanticism, Something About Airplanes, and even the belittled Plans. The album sounds glorious and all, but if Death Cab dig a little deeper into their bag of tricks next time around, the end result could be a record with the same enduring replay value of their back catalog.
Tuesday, September 7th, 2010
By Alex Waage
The turritopsis nutricula is a genus of jellyfish that has been proclaimed by the experts to be “immortal”. It achieves its seemingly perpetual existence by riding a life cycle in which it grows to maturity, shrinks down to a polyp, and then burgeons back into adulthood only to revert to the start of the cycle again and again and so on and so forth.
Like the immortal jellyfish, Weezer seem to have been on the alternative rock scene forever, fluctuating between being a band capable of brilliance and being a band capable of making a great punch line. After the release of their self-titled 1994 debut and their sophomore album, the cult-classic Pinkerton, Weezer became wedged between a proverbial rock and hard place. While The Green Album, Maladroit and Make Believe were too bland and uninspired, The Red Album and Raditude were too bold for their own good, experimenting wildly with styles untouched by the band and resulting in some of the lowest points in their career. With each album, Rivers Cuomo and company were trying their hand at the futile balancing act of appeasing calloused critics, a cynical fan base, the general public, and themselves. However, it seems that the unabashedly nerdy quartet has come as close as possible to achieving such a feat with their newest record, Hurley.
While a pleasant surprise for die-hard fans and casual observers alike, Hurley is anything but a return to form for the band. It serves more as a summation of their career, flaunting the band’s strengths while blending in the kind of sonic curve balls that have baffled the masses for the past decade, albeit in a way far more successful than before. Throughout the ten tracks that make up the album, a plethora of sounds are tinkered with, but never once do they feel forced. The result is a surprisingly cohesive album that recalls moments and textures from the Weezer back catalogue. Songs like “Smart Girls” and “Ruling Me” are chugging pop sing-alongs in the vein of The Green Album while “Run Away” and “Hang On” are reminiscent of Make Believe-era balladry. Even the meat-headed riffs featured on “Where’s My Sex?” and “Brave New World” are not unlike those on Maladroit.
Despite the vague likenesses that they bear to songs from Weezer’s past, the tunes on Hurley are far better than their predecessors on the aforementioned albums. For instance, “Hang On” is a poppy ballad, but that in no way prevents the band from experimenting with the instrumentation featured within. In fact, Michael Cera of Arrested Development and Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World plays mandolin on the track.
This is not to say that the entire album is as perfect and inspired as one might hope. Sprinkled throughout the album are awkwardly constructed couplets like “And if you take this away from me/I’ll never forgive you can’t you see” from the otherwise-brilliant “Unspoken”. Still, no song is as lyrically insipid as “Where’s My Sex?”. The song is the album’s undeniable low point in every way and its awkwardly placed bridge certainly doesn’t help. Seriously, it’s completely shoehorned in.
Listening to Hurley again, I feel about as satisfied as a Weezer fan can expect to feel. Rivers, Pat, Brian, and Scott are finally heading in a creative direction that feels natural and appropriate for the band at this point. It’s no Pinkerton, but Hurley is a quirky, imaginative record that the band can be truly proud of. Fans of the band can expect even more solid music in the future, considering that November sees the release of the two-disc Pinkerton: Deluxe Edition and Death To False Metal, a compilation of unheard and unreleased songs from the band’s recording history. With Hurley released and these gems on the way, 2010 is a good year to be a Weezer fan.
