A Thousand Clever Lines

Taking Back Sunday hold a very special place in our musical hearts and whilst we wouldn’t call them our favourite band they are definitely in our Top Five. They’re a band we probably wouldn’t have listened to had a much cooler friend not mentioned them in passing. Now, some twenty-plus years later, we are so very glad that they did.

Tell All Your Friends is one of a handful of albums that we can listen to over and over again without skipping a single track. It’s raw, unpolished, and full of youthful angst. It is the perfect nostalgia album, a thirty or so minute window on our past.

We open with “You Know How I Do”, which lays out the motifs for the album: love, loss, and ultimately, regret. It also introduces us to the duelling vocals of Adam Lazzara and John Nolan. The two will continue to sing at and over each other for the whole album. Female vocals are added to the mix on “Bike Scene”, raising the tension and the sense of conflict.

“Cute Without the ‘E’ (Cut from the Team)” is the post-hardcore x emo anthem of a generation. The only time we’ve ever heard an audience sing along to another band’s song when it played before a concert started. The song documents the fallout from a betrayal, the spurned lover demanding to know whether their side of the story is going to be told.

We see another side of the band on “There’s No ‘I’ in Team”, their response to a feud with a former member. It’s slower and is heavy with a sense of regret. This is Nolan’s are we the bad guys? moment.

Things appear to slow down with the opening of “Great Romances of the 20th Century” but they won’t stay that way for long. We are returned to the middle of a break-up, two people breaking up on the walk home from a night out. The album’s only ballad, “Ghost Man on Third” follows, a song fraught with emotion and maybe just a little bit out of place here.

“Timberwolves at New Jersey” picks things back up with the band taking shots at other members of the local music scene. “The Blue Channel” follows and it is probably the most energetic song on what is an incredibly energetic album. The frenetic pianos give way to explosive vocals and guitars.

And so, we come to “You’re So Last Summer” and the closest we’ve ever come to getting a song lyric tattoo. Two song lyric tattoos in fact. We never would but such is our love for this song we would consider it. This is an anti-love song, witty and sarcastic in a way only a twenty-something year old can be. “I’d never lie to you, unless I had to” gets a sly smile every time and “I’m a wishful thinker with the worst intentions” is the dark epitaph we would secretly be pleased with.

“Head Club” closes the album and it brings everything to a dramatic close. The relationship is over, the last fight has been had and now it’s time to just walk away. The duelling vocals are reprised for a final time, repeating the last two lines to devastating effect.

Tell All Your Friends is our musical comfort blanket, a safe space that we can always come back to.

Tell All Your Friends is Taped

ø