And “You’re So Last Summer”’s unforgettable line-“You could slit my throat/And with my one last gasping breath I’d apologize for bleeding on your shirt”-is both achingly real and downright absurd, a humorous quality hammered home by Flava Flav’s bizarre lip-sync to the lines in the song’s video. You can imagine Cary Grant delivering a quip like “Cute Without the E”’s “don’t bother, angel,” through a plume of cigarette smoke. Women are addressed as “sweetie” and “princess,” terms that endow their songs the satirical register of screwball comedy. But the band knowingly play into emo’s tropes-by 2002, already well-worn-with a knowing wink. They are, she wrote in a 2003 essay, “denied the dignity of humanization through both the language and narratives only of consequence in romantic settings.” It’s hard to deny this read of Tell All Your Friends’ lyrics. “The Blue Channel” takes a sleazy riff and soaks it in screams, before Lazzara’s taunting whisper at the song’s close: “Do you know what your girl’s been up to?”Īt times like this, author Jessica Hopper’s description of women in emo songs comes to mind. “Ghost Man on Third” is a brutally vivid chronicle of addiction and suicidal ideation, on which Lazzara wrenchingly repeats the line, “It’s a shame I don’t think that they’ll notice.” Meanwhile, “Bike Scene,” with gorgeous backing vocals from Nolan’s sister Michelle DaRosa, fits in a hundred hooks while it evokes post-heartbreak depression.
The psyche of young, white, cis straight men is dissected with startling candor. “We won’t stand for hazy eyes anymore.” It’s a sublime bit of chest-puffing nonsense, a stake in the ground that’s twisted until it holds fast. “So sick so sick of being tired, and oh so tired of being sick.” Later, a chorus-slash-manifesto arrives alongside guitars that hit like an electrical current’s surge. Frontman Adam Lazzara-a microphone masochist with the swooping hair of a Funko Pop! figurine-delivers the album’s opening lines as if he’s been waiting his whole life to do it. On Tell All Your Friends, every instrument pushes against each other.
Guitarist Eddie Reyes had played in bands including the Movielife, and the call-and-response vocals of another former band, Clockwise, inspired Adam Lazzara and John Nolan’s fevered duels. The hooks of the Get Up Kids, the intensity of Thursday, and the post-rockish flourishes of Cap’n Jazz come together in Taking Back Sunday’s taut, poppy anthems, while also leaving a breadcrumb trail for fans to go deeper into the genre. Their sound, though, had tell-tale antecedents in Long Island’s thriving late-’90s punk scene and post-hardcore across the nation. The stretch of grey highway depicted on the cover of their debut album Tell All Your Friends is about as region-specific as a McDonald’s.
In 1999, the five-piece formed in Amityville, New York, leading their then-label Victory Records to proclaim that “a city that has been synonymous with nothing but horror since the 1979 release of The Amityville Horror is about to be redefined.” But given the near-universal concerns of their landmark debut Tell All Your Friends-heartbreak, jealousy, and depression, elevated to an operatic intensity-the five-piece could have come from just about any out-of-the-way place in the U.S. Taking Back Sunday’s members came from the kind of suburban towns that have a way of magnifying anxiety, isolation, and paranoia into high-stakes urgency.
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