Taking Back Sunday: Where You Want To Be : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Taking Back Sunday are poster boys for the serial trysts and breakups of the emo love life. The frenetic, hardcore pop of the New York band's 2002 tantrum Tell All Your Friends was topped by two screaming frontmen -- Adam Lazzara and singer-guitarist John Nolan -- who acted out the he-said, she-said electricity of treachery, recrimination and confession. But on the eve of the band's victory lap on the Warped Tour that followed the album's release, Nolan -- who co-wrote that record's nuanced highlight "There's No 'I' in Team" -- decided there would be no Nolan in Sunday. He and bassist Shaun Cooper quit. Lazzara has described the split as a mere "lineup change," while online fan chatter blames troubles close to home (Lazzara's rocky relationship with Nolan's sister).

On Where You Want to Be, Nolan's angsty yell has been replaced by the the competent yowl of fellow Long Islander Fred Mascherino, and Matt Rubano takes up bass duties with rhythmic assurance. The changes bolster the will to power in Lazzara's Cure-like croon. "Set Phasers to Stun" opens the album with declarative thunder: "I will never make another promise," Lazzara announces amid the band's distorted, ska-like chop. In "Bonus Mosh II," he jumps out of the song's tricky rhythm with straightforward pain: "It's love," he sings, with a touch of raw-sugar Bon Jovi, "Make it hurt." But the closest he gets to the emotional tensions and ragged-rock edge of Tell All Your Friends is in "Decade Under the Influence," a jittery song about growing up awry, and the sweeping closer, ". . . Slowdance on the Inside," in which Lazzara asks us to join him in prayer -- a blunt admission that his new beginning is only just getting off the ground.