Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

I hope everyone called their mothers today! I certainly did, and then I referenced her in a blog post. (Love you, mommy!) Anyway, apropos of almost nothing, here’s a song for Mother’s Day, a new track from Taking Back Sunday. Listen to a little “Best Places to Be a Mom.”

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know that Brand New is probably my favorite band. I love them to death, but at the same time, can you imagine Jesse Lacey dropping the brooding, self-serious routine long enough to appear on Yo Gabba Gabba? Watch a little Taking Back Sunday.

Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know that I’m a cover fiend. So you can imagine my unrestrained joy upon coming across this video of Taking Back Sunday’s Adam Lazzara performing “Question,” by the Old 97’s, which I’m currently trying to learn on the ukulele.

And if you want to hear the original, it’s best listened to in this commercial for Fuse from a few years ago. Also, if this isn’t the most wicked precious thing you’ve ever seen, I would advise you to go to your doctor and ask her how you possibly could have survived so long without a fucking heart.

Tell All Your Friends

3) Taking Back Sunday, Tell All Your Friends (2002)

Part of what turns music you like into music you love is sharing it with other people. Tell All Your Friends is one of those albums that me and my high school crew all love. It’s tough to come across records like that, even among people who like the same type of music. As a consequence, every track incites Proustian remembrances of some kind of a good time. That’s a good album right there!

Tell All Your Friends is the debut album of the Long Island emo/pop punk outfit Taking Back Sunday. The band has put out several more albums since, with different lineups, and they’re all pretty good. None, however, matches that first album with Eddie Reyes on guitar, Mark O’Connell on drums, Shaun Cooper on bass, John Nolan on guitar and backing vocals, and the inimitable Adam Lazzara on lead vocals. That particular lineup only lasted one album, with the aforementioned Nolan and Cooper leaving to form Straylight Run. Oh well, right? Can’t complain about that turn of events, since it produced two of my favorite albums of the decade.

There’s a number of things that make TBS the band that it is. One is the superhuman pipes of Mr. Lazzara. Like a running quarterback that refuses to learn how to slide before getting laid out by a 250-pound linebacker, Lazzara treats his vocal chords as recklessly as if they weren’t the instrument through which he makes his living. Witness his transition from one-marble-in-the-mouth warbling to lung-busting screams to larynx-shattering wailing and back again on tracks like “Bike Scene,” “Timberwolves at New Jersey,” and “The Blue Channel.” I dunno how long the guy can keep it up.

The vocals would just be window dressing, of course, if they weren’t delivering great lyrics. Of all the albums on this list, Tell All Your Friends is by far the most quotable. If you’ve ever heard Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun say that you’ve got this silly way of keeping me on the edge of my seat; that if we go down, we go down together; that September never gets this cold where I come from; or that I’ve got the mic, and you’ve got the mosh pit, you have Tell All Your Friends to thank. And of course, this album gives us the most archetypically emo lyric in the history of emo music, the line that I would present were I asked to present one example that typifies the conceit of the genre, from “You’re So Last Summer”: “The truth / is you could slit my throat, / and with my one last gasping breath I’d apologize for bleeding on your shirt.” Gives you chills, don’t it?

Signature track: “Cute Without the ‘E’ (Cut from the Team)”

Ah, those four chords. I don’t want to harp about the scene, but among connoisseurs of this genre, those four chords are positively iconic. “Cute Without the ‘E’” is just one of those pantheon songs. The jukebox at Mary Ann’s (the worst bar in America, in sunny Cleveland Circle, the Times Square of Brighton, Massachusetts) had this track, and I would play it EVERY time I went there, in the vain hopes that some wicked emo chick, with a choppy haircut and some metal in her face, would should me a knowing glance and mouth the words “The only thing I regret is that I never let you hold me back.” Alas, it never happened. (And for the record, the lyrics that get bleeped out up there are “And will you tell all your friends / you’ve got your gun to my head?” The prudes at MTV need to figure out that there are far worse things on the Intertubes than reference to guns.)

This song encapsulates what I think is the best feature of Tell All Your Friends: the vocal interplay between Lazarra and Nolan. Later incarnations of Taking Back Sunday have featured perfectly capable background vocalists. On the first album, though, there are a fair number of tracks where John Nolan is more of a co-vocalist. The back and forth makes for a real dynamic tune, especially the harmonies toward the end. Also, if you think myself and the Official Bandmate of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun weren’t belting out this tune during our now-infamous trip to Long Island, well, you’re just fooling yourself.

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.