Taking Back Sunday - Tidal Wave

Taking Back Sunday
Tidal Wave
2016
Spotify

"Emo Nights" have been popping up across the country allowing thirty somethings to remember, dance and rage face to the same music they used to listen to in high school, some college and maybe secretly when life gets to sad. With this in mind bands have been making sudo comebacks (see The Starting Line) to a niche degree of success. Taking Back Sunday however have been towing the emo line with Adam Lazzara still pushing the music and his particular brand of it. From the start Taking Back Sunday have been wrought with drama. Breakup upon breakup and lineup change after lineup change means the band are a long way from their first album Tell All Your Friends. Tidal Wave feels much more post punk, and even skewing heavily into the straight up rock and roll side of things. "You Can't Look Back" even has a country feel at some points in the song which are so incredibly out of place it's jarring. Perhaps this would have been a nice departure for the band at the height of their powers, but even then it feels off. Taking Back Sunday were a band that was great at letting out raw emotion, and putting deep emotional lyrics into a track that never sacrificed on being powerful. When original member and eventual Straylight Run front man John Nolan left the band did loose a bit of their magic and the decline was slow yet steady.

Tidal Wave feels like it is always playing catch up, both to a modern sound and to whatever past it may be trying to reclaim. For a band trying to stage a resurgence you would think a more modern sound would be the right approach, but Adam Lazzara has not seemed to grow up at all. He still feels all those high school emotions and it is still the way that He relates to the world. "I Felt it Too" is a song that is so incredibly overblown, building tension over its almost five and a half minute length, only to pay it off with some loud fuzz which of course ends back with the solo electric guitar and Adam's voice. It is so incredibly predictable that any novelty the song may have just evaporates. IT is almost as if Taking Back Sunday were hoping for a pop record with Tidal Wave but didn't want to give up any punk credibility they might still have so a watered down version of both is what we are left with. To assert that Taking Back Sunday take themselves way to seriously would be an understatement, but that has been the case from the very beginning. Tidal Wave does nothing to show that the band is moving in an exciting direction, or really taking a risk, thus it ends up being another step on that slow path to obscurity.

3.0 out of 10