Louder Now
Taking Back Sunday make an unusually strong entrance on Louder Now. What's It Feel Like to Be a Ghost? begins with a clipped guitar figure, then grows into a controlled burst of noise around Adam Lazzara's voice. The band sound forceful without letting the individual parts blur together. It sets a demanding standard for the rest of the record.
Liar (It Takes One to Know One) keeps that standard high. Lazzara and Fred Mascherino exchange lines with a sharp sense of timing, giving the song a second source of rhythm beyond the drums. The argument is familiar territory for the band, but the performance makes its turns feel active and specific.
Eric Valentine's production helps. The guitars have weight, the bass has a clear place in the sound, and the voices can overlap without losing every edge. That clarity makes the record's scale feel earned. The band do not need to make the arrangements complicated to make them sound substantial.
MakeDamnSure is the most direct example of their ability to turn tension into a large chorus. Lazzara's breathless phrasing gives the verse character before the hook arrives. Twenty-Twenty Surgery also benefits from strong singing, with the vocal layers adding warmth to a record that can otherwise feel locked in confrontation.
The more patient My Blue Heaven suggests another possibility. Its changes in mood and the added strings give the song a wider emotional space, and the heavier passages matter more because they have something different to interrupt. It is one of the album's most satisfying arrangements.
Some of the surrounding songs are less distinctive, relying on familiar rises in volume and another urgent vocal exchange. The band execute that approach well, but the record occasionally makes refinement seem like the limit of its ambition. Louder Now remains an enjoyable set because the strongest songs have real precision and purpose. It is the sound of a band improving the tools they already trust, with a few glimpses of how much further those tools could take them.
