Taking Back Sunday: Tell All Your Friends : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Amityville, New York's Taking Back Sunday have all the trappings of an emo-by-numbers band: a two-singer front with one wounded guy and one slightly mental lung-scraper, a pretentious name and rousing songs of heartbreak that beg for ubiquitous audience sing-alongs. Something funny happened on the way to this potential Amityville horror, though. The band's debut, Tell All Your Friends, sidesteps many sad-sack emo pitfalls with bracing pop-infused hardcore and enlightened, dramatic lyrics about heartache that teeter on a razor's edge between despondency and dark vengeance. "You could slit my throat and with my one last gasping breath/I'd apologize for bleeding on your shirt," singer Adam Lazzara yelps in "You're So Last Summer," a typical TBS blitz of chunky guitars, overlapping vocals and push-and-pull tempos. Lazzara's vocals are shadowed by guitarist/singer John Nolan's shredded rasp -- his sense of vein-popping melody helps keep songs such as "Bike Scene" and the band's breakthrough single, "Cute Without the 'E' (Cut from the Team)," on the harder edge of such peers as New Found Glory. A mumbled lyric from "There's No 'I' In Team" best captures Sunday's credo: "Irony is for suckers."