Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

Longtime pals of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun will understand what a big deal it is for a new Taking Back Sunday album to come out, so you’ll indulge me if I amble through a few ruminations on their record, New Again, which came out on Tuesday.

First, the good news: the first single, “Sink Into Me,” is crazy awesome. I don’t want to call it a top-five song in TBS’s oeuvre, but if I did, I think I’d have a serious argument. It’s got a hooky chorus, a nice stomping backbeat, and is the precise type of song that the band will undoubtedly lead off the current tour’s shows with. There’s clapping (always popular with a live audience) and a lot of “hey! hey! hey!”s (even more popular!). It also sounds different enough from the rest of the TBS’s catalog to give serious fans confidence that the band is capable of continued development. Very hopeful stuff. Take a listen.

The bad news? The rest of the album is sort of meh. It has good songs, that’s for sure. They all just sound very derivative of one another. One of TBS’s trademark lyrical moves is the repeated line, and in past efforts, they’ve used it with great effectiveness. Think of the great Taking Back Sunday songs: “Cute Without the ‘E’” (This all was only wishful thinking/This all was only wishful thinking); “You’re So Last Summer” (Boys like you are a dime a dozen/Boys like you are a dime a dozen); “Set Phasers to Stun” (like, every lyric). I could go on. When TBS repeats a line, it’s either got some hook to it, or it’s in the middle of a forceful chorus, or it’s an echo that reinforces a vital lyric. I guess what I’m trying to say is that in its purposefulness, the repetition is inconspicuous.

There’s not one track on New Again that doesn’t include a repeated lyric. That in itself isn’t a terrible thing, but it becomes a problem when it’s exacerbated by other weaknesses. In a collection of songs that don’t have a ton of lyrical heft (which New Again’s songs unfortunately don’t), can a songwriter really afford to repeat himself? Song after song, you notice the repetition, and it leads you to wonder “couldn’t they have squeezed a different lyric in there?” In literature, this is called “being taken out of the narrative.”

The weakest songs are rendered that much weaker by their proximity to tunes that actually solve the repetition problem. It’s actually easy. We’re emo fans; we’re not looking for much. Look at “Swing,” where what could have been a lazily repeated lyric becomes a bit of wordplay: “How long before you don’t remember me?/How long before I’m just a memory.” Or “Cut Me Up, Jenny”: “I took full advantage of/Being taken full advantage of.” We’re not in Bob Dylan or Craig Finn territory here, but at least those lines are catchy. (”Swing” also benefits from having some cool guitars, reminiscent of “Error: Operator,” which is the kind of thing I’m a sucker for.)

Another unfortunate problem is that the songs on New Again have a hollowness to them, a lack of dynamic quality that the rest of the band’s catalog has in spades. I’ll make two guesses as to why this is the case. Firstly, the band lost its guitarist/backing vocalist Fred Mascharino in the offseason. His replacement, Matt Fazzi, is a perfectly capable replacement on the guitar, but I got the sense that on this new album, he wasn’t being leaned on to provide background vocals. Taking Back Sunday, at its best, was a two-man show on the microphone. Back when John Nolan was in the band (heretofore referred to as “The Halcyon Days”), he and lead vocalist Adam Lazzara would routinely trade off on singing duties (recall “There’s No ‘I’ in Team”). There was less of that on Where You Want to Be and Louder Now, but Mascherino still got his shots. Fazzi seems absent on New Again, only occasionally chiming in to echo a lyric or back up a chorus. I won’t speculate as to why that’s the case, but it takes a weapon out of the band’s arsenal. It’s a lot like basketball. Think of Lazzara as Lebron James. When he’s got the ball, he has two choices: drive through five guys’ worth of traffic to the hoop, or dish it out to a perimeter guy. If that perimeter guy doesn’t exist, well, then the King is in for a long game. Lazzara is doing it all himself.

Which leads to my second guess, that Lazzara just doesn’t have the pipes any more. I don’t mean to say that he doesn’t have ANY pipes: he clearly does, and I’m a huge fan of his as a singer. But he just no longer seems capable of being as brash and cavalier in the higher octaves as he used to be. I don’t think we’ll hear passionate wailing like in “Bike Scene” or the second half of the new “Your Own Disaster” any time soon. It’s a shame, because those were great songs!

Now, were this the band’s second album, I would have a reason for concern. But the fact is, Taking Back Sunday already has a stable of pantheon songs. Fans going to a TBS show aren’t necessarily thirsting for new material; in fact, we don’t want our favorite classics thrown to the side in favor of so-so novelties. New Again strikes me as a showman’s type of album. It’s got a fist-pumping single, and a bunch of pedestrian tunes that aren’t hard to sing along to. My prediction is, as time goes by, “Sink Into Me” will nestle itself into a steady spot in the setlist, next to “Cute Without the E,” “A Decade Under the Influence,” “Makedamnsure,” and the rest of our favorites. The other songs will be schlepped off and forgotten. Not a big deal.

The second bit of good news? I thought almost but not quite the same general things about Louder Now when it came out, and now I find myself listening to that album and loving most of the tracks. As another of my all-time faves sings, the songs you grow to like never stick at first.

And a postscript: I just came across a couple reviews of this album, and critics seem to love it. Why? Because it represents TBS’s rise from post-hardcore niche band to radio-ready wunderkind. That should tell you a little bit about where my sensibilities lie.