TAKING BACK SUNDAY – NEW AGAIN
It is very difficult to be fair and constructive when writing about music of this kind. Ironically titled, this record from American super-emo merchants Taking Back Sunday is anything but new. For want of a reference point, we have here some kind of bastardised distillation of The Foo Fighters and My Chemical Romance, via The Killers. The emo-pop hooks and auto-tuned wailing vocals are, from the get-go with the signature track New Again, utterly exhausting to listen to. The band have been produced by David Kahne to high-octane major-label sheen; these songs pound away with layer upon layer of processed performance; and the preposterously snarly Cut Me Up Jenny and neo-romanticism of Carpathia show songwriter Adam Lazzara’s penchant for the dreary coming to the fore. There are positives to be explored and should be noted – the power-pack drumming and hard Gibson riffery is well performed, and gutsy. But this stuff is concocted to a formula, and while expertly done, with so much of this genre-that-shan’t-be-named music out there, one would expect people to be doing something new with the form.
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