Taking Back Sunday – New Again

A band is more than just one person, its a group of people playing together and making music. What makes a band special is not something that rests solely on the shoulders of one member but instead it’s how the different members feed off one another that makes them truly memorable. That’s why neither Angels & Airwaves or +44 were as good as Blink-182 were, because they were missing the spark that the trio had together – separated they were good but just not as good.

That, unfortunately, is Taking Back Sunday‘s problem as well. Their breakout 2002 album Tell All Your Friends was a masterpiece because of how everyone in the band worked off of one another – particularly John Nolan and Adam Lazzara. That happened for only one album before Nolan and bassist Shaun Cooper left to start another band and right away you could tell they were missing that certain spark that made them so fantastic. That’s not saying that Where You Want To Be and Louder Now were disappointing, far from it – they were in fact quite good as Lazzara found a way to work quite well with newly appointed guitarist Fred Mascherino.

Fast forward to the present and Taking Back Sunday‘s lineup has changed once again. Yet another new guitarist has come into play which has once again changed the musical landscape that is TBS and I can’t shake the feeling that New Again is missing that spark that made Tell All Your Friends so genius.

Now, New Again is still Taking Back Sunday – that’s hard to deny. Lazzara’s vocals are still present. Eddie Reyes’ (one of the few members who has been there since the beginning) guitar work can still be picked out. They still have the distinctive staccato emo sound that they popularized but have warped it into more of a rock sound too, a continual evolution that has been present on all of their releases.

But New Again is missing something. The dueling and overlapping vocals are nonexistent, only really appearing once or twice throughout the entire album. It feels more polished than anything the band has done before, covering their small club sound with an arena rock shine which, in turns, makes it seem constrained and held back. Lyrically, New Again falls equally as flat. Where they used to write lyrics ripped with ironic venom and fascinating turns of phrases, very few lyrics are even memorable let alone quotable (the fact that there isn’t a lyrics sheet is also a disappointing aspect of the album).

The best songs are the slower ones, like Capital M-E, Summer, Man and Where My Mouth Is – the later of which is could be the follow-up to My Name is Fred Astaire. As a whole though, the record is just missing something, making it oddly forgettable. Lazzara and Reyes are missing the aspect that previous members brought to the table – so much so that the best songs of the album are the ones that are about them.