T aking Back Sunday’s sophomore album, Where You Want To Be, manages to wed tortured emo to mosh-inducing punk, with its discontented wailing and incessantly switching from heavy guitars and pounding drums to stripped-down instrumentals.
The album’s first single, “A Decade Under the Influence”, is one of the best constructed songs on the album. Weaving in and out of sharp percussion, repeated chords, and slightly ambiguous lyrics, the song suggests a slightly difficult-to-detect profundity. Later, the track deftly slips into a sweet melodic reverie coupled with unsweetened lyrics: “To hell with you and all your friends/ I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” and even flirts with screaming.
“Little Devotional” and “Number Five with a Bullet” illuminate the album’s theme of relationship insecurity yet contain more lyrical clarity and raw emotion than the rest of the album. On “Little Devotional,” the singer’s voice gravelly relates “While you’re slipping back in through your dress… Do you honestly think he’d be better at doing what I do best?” becoming progressively wilder throughout. Meanwhile, on “Number Five with a Bullet,” lead singer Adam Lazzara proclaims, “You’re so hit or miss and that’s so ‘93” over an alternating rushed and yielding instrumental background.
Although Lazzara’s screaming at times seems stale and forced, and the lyrics are somewhat immature, the album’s frequent flashes of undeniable musical polish and towering first-week sales (No. 3 on the Billboard Charts its first week), suggests that Taking Back Sunday is poised to become the next indie-band that is accessible to the mainstream public.
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