Tell All Your Friends
Two people trying to finish the same argument can make a remarkable amount of noise. On Tell All Your Friends, Adam Lazzara and John Nolan turn overlapping vocals into the main force of Taking Back Sunday's songs. One line interrupts another, a melody becomes a shout, and even the clearest chorus seems to contain an unresolved disagreement.
Cute Without the E (Cut from the Team) makes that approach particularly effective. The guitar rhythm is tight enough to hold everything together while the voices pull in different directions. Its repeated phrases gain meaning through the way they are delivered against one another. The performance sounds desperate without becoming shapeless.
You're So Last Summer is more immediately inviting, but its bright tune does not make the emotional outlook any healthier. The writing is possessive, wounded and sometimes absurdly dramatic. That combination can be funny as well as uncomfortable, although the women addressed in these songs are too often reduced to the cause of somebody else's suffering.
The band provide plenty of movement around the singing. The guitars have rough edges and small changes in direction, while the drums keep the songs from settling into a purely predictable rush. Bike Scene benefits from especially strong backing voices, adding another layer to the record's already crowded emotional conversations.
Ghost Man on Third is the more exposed achievement. Lazzara uses breath, strain and changes in emphasis to make the uncertainty feel difficult to control. The song's darker account of distress asks for attention beyond the pleasure of shouting a chorus. It gives the album an important centre of gravity.
The sound is not especially tidy, and the emotional language can become repetitive when every setback is treated as a catastrophe. Yet the untidy quality helps these performances feel inhabited. Tell All Your Friends is compelling because the band make conflicted feelings audible in the arrangements themselves. The hooks invite you in, and the competing voices keep the songs unsettled after the invitation has been accepted.
