Taking Back Sunday
Louder Now
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Decrease Font SizeEditor's Review:
Depending on your disposition, Taking Back Sunday are a band you either want
to thank or throttle. After all, the tone they set on their 2002 debut Tell
All Your Friends, seemingly came out of nowhere to revolutionize the pop-punk/
melodic rock world, spawning entire Warped Tours worth of bandwagon jumpers
and creating an entirely new lexicon of hyphenated genre-descriptors for music
journalists, most of whom are still trying to figure out what exactly “emo”
means.
What is clear, however, is that four years, one record (2004’s Where
You Want to Be) and a much-talked-about label switch (from über-indie
Victory Records to their new home at Warner Bros.) later, Taking Back Sunday
find themselves smack dab in a mainstream rock world they helped create. And
if Louder Now is any indication, the band are more than up to the task
of being the Bon Jovi of a new generation.
Despite a few sore-thumb attempts at “mixing it up” (“Miami”),
Louder Now is more or less what you would imagine the new Taking Back Sunday
album should sound like. Frontman Adam Lazzara’s flippant croon takes
center stage, rolling out ambiguous catchphrase after ambiguous catchphrase
(usually echoed directly by guitarist Fred Mascherino’s hollering) with
the band doing their best to stay the hell out of the way. Though the occasional
instrumental flourish (the opening guitar line of “Spin”) and the
overall rock-solid drumming of Mark O’Connell keep things from dragging,
Taking Back Sunday isn’t a band known for their technical prowess. What
they are known for, however, is taking an entirely predictable melody (“Up
Against (Blackout),” “Error Operator”) and driving it so far
into your head that you find yourself singing it for days. Like or not, Louder
Now is proof enough that Taking Back Sunday deserves their place among the pantheon
of tastemaking rock bands. As far as cookie-cutters go, there could be worse
shapes than Taking Back Sunday.
— Daniel Taylor
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 Record Label Warner Bros Released April 2006 |
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