A new album demonstrates a new sound
There comes a point where older bands need to decide amongst themselves whether they’ve aged like a fine wine or if they’ve aged like era-specific opinions; somewhat rotten and possibly unsafe for consumption.
Taking Back Sunday, a band ironically the same age as their primary fan base (17 years young), released Tidal Wave on Sept. 16, 2016 through Hopeless Records. With 12 new tracks, this is the third album featuring original lead vocalists Adam Lazzara and John Nolan, and the seventh in their discography. A band made famous for their quick-wit and cutting quips, Taking Back Sunday excelled in a toxic sensitivity endemic of the emo genre back in the late ’90s and early aughts. These days, the members of Taking Back Sunday are men with longtime partners, children, and mortgages. The kind of high-energy, vitriolic passive-aggression Taking Back Sunday was first known for, is no longer sustainable.
Instead, the boys of Taking Back Sunday head in a new direction, a type of dad-rock-Americana suited for road trips through the midwest.
Following the operatic and rock-heavy opening track “Death Wolf,” Taking Back Sunday launches into the strange folk-rock, Dropkick Murphy tribute, “Tidal Wave.” Faster and more melodic than their early “emo” tracks, it is clear from the first movements of the album that Taking Back Sunday refuses to be pigeonholed into any one genre.
In “You Can’t Look Back,” Lazzara and Nolan sing, “I’m not the same man.” There is a growth lurking beneath the words and climbing guitars. No longer the naive misogynists of their late adolescence, they place the onus of victories and defeats upon themselves, not the objects of their affections.
Longtime fans will be gratified to hear that the stylistic elements that define the band remain: competing guitars, complicated choral background singing, and overtly emotional topics are present in each track. While the combination of influences in each song can occasionally make the album feel haphazard and messy, there is an undeniable current of emotional maturity running beneath each song.
In “I Felt it Too,” Lazzara and his bandmates lower themselves to a level of intimacy inconceivable during their Tell All Your Friends days. The sweet, sparse mid-range guitar, almost complete absence of percussion, and lightly layered voices of the band lend this track a reverent quality. The boys, to their fans, to their partners, to one another, sing, “I know you’re tired, I feel it too.”
“I Felt it Too,” located halfway through the album, functions as a breather, halfway between the past and the present, linking Taking Back Sunday from the boys they were, to the men they are now.
If you’ll allow me to slip into the first person briefly, I am not the same person I was when I first fell in love with Taking Back Sunday, and neither are they. It feels good, in a bizarre, ineffably personal way, to know that while we’ve grown apart, we have both grown up.
Photo courtesy of Taking Back Sunday.