Taking Back Sunday - Tell All Your Friends Album Review
Written September 10, 2002

I’m sure you’ve all heard of bands such as Saves the Day, Dashboard Confessional and New Found Glory, who are currently championing the emo (short for emotional) movement in music that MTV has recently set its sights on exploiting and homogenizing. Thankfully there is still a gold mine of talent beneath the surface of the genre that has yet to be force fed to the masses by the music television monolith. A prime example of this juicy secret is New York punk quintet Taking Back Sunday and their delicious debut album on Victory Records, Tell All Your Friends.

Although they are a relatively new band, Taking Back Sunday features good production values and incredibly catchy songs that will sit in your head for days. Guitarist Ed Reyes was once in punk-pop supergroup The Movielife and his experience is evident in most of the songs on the album, while vocalist Adam Lazzara belts out semi-depressing lyrics in a way that almost makes you wish your girlfriend would dump you so you could fully identify with his message. Don’t get me wrong though, this is no whiny “Boo hoo, watch me cry” band. Songs like Cute Without the ‘E’ carry as much anger as you’ll hear in anything from prefab angst wonders Linkin Park, and even the less stellar tracks on the album (Bike Scene comes to mind) are performed satisfactorily and fit nicely into the mix. This is one of those rare cd’s where you actually want to listen the whole way through, rather than tediously enduring the mediocre songs while you wait for the singles to roll around. All in all, an extremely worthy effort.

While Taking Back Sunday leaves plenty of room to evolve and get better in the future, Tell All Your Friends is definitely enough to set the group apart from the rest of the pack for the time being. And if you ARE telling all your friends, please make sure you don’t know anybody who works for MTV.

I only wrote this so I could have something to show as a sample for my Opinion columnist interview. I am noticing a distinct anti-MTV vehemence in a lot of my stuff from this time, incidentally. I think that sort of wore off - "fight the established system" got a little contrived after a while.