Taking Back Sunday - Where You Want To Be Album Review
Written July 3, 2004

Taking Back Sunday’s new release may be titled Where You Want To Be, but after several years of leaning heavily on their phenomenal debut, one has to wonder whether the band really intended to end up here. Faced with the difficult task of creating a sophomore album capable of rivaling Tell All Your Friends, the quintet evidently decided to stick with a formula that worked.

The result is a disc that features the same hooky melodies and intricately layered vocal medleys as its predecessor, but lacks the songwriting punch. While it’s an unspoken assumption that every mediocre emo-punk band has to play a cover of the oh-so-trendy “You’re So Last Summer”, no song on Where You Want To Be is likely to attract the same obsession.

That said, the album isn’t painful to listen to and certainly doesn’t do Taking Back Sunday any grave injustice. Its’ only crime lies in being unremarkable in the face of towering, perhaps unrealistic, expectations. The emo (God I hate that word) genre is crowded and restless, full of clones jostling for precious seconds of scenester attention. Unless MTV adopts Taking Back Sunday as their latest pet, Where You Want To Be is unlikely to thrust the band back into the spotlight.

Definite highlights of the album include “One-Eighty By Summer” and the ballad-y “New American Classic”. Unfortunately the band has already selected “A Decade Under the Influence” to be the first single, a weaker track with a potentially precognitive chorus: “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.” Amusing irony aside, the album’s lyricism isn’t too bad – one part wistfulness and one part relationship rage – but once again lacking the power to make any of it memorable.

In summary, while the aptly titled Tell All Your Friends sparked a forest fire word-of-mouth fan following, naming the sophomore release Where You Want To Be isn’t likely to be enough to convince listeners to stay for long.

Afterword: I let a random girl from New York Pita listen to a ten-second sound byte of the album while I was waiting for my chicken caesar. She said it sounded like “a blend of Good Charlotte and Simple Plan.” I was appalled.

I got this album about a month before it was officially released and this review in the summer Cord was my jackass way of showing that I am so super-techno-cool that I can get stuff way before anyone else. The album itself turned out to grow on me - I half thought about coming back and writing a little more favourably but in the end it was no dice. The part about the pita girl was entirely true, sadly enough.