Review Summary: All Time Bleh
I wanted to write a whole introduction about my long-term on and off relationship with All Time Low, but after listening to
Tell Me I'm Alive, I decided that it was useless. The only point it would really serve to make would be to highlight the fact that All Time Low have written music that has been both hailed as excellent and deplored as repulsive. They are one of the few bands I have followed that with every release, I could never totally predict exactly how good (or bad) it would be.
With
Tell Me I'm Alive it’s different though. You see, I can hardly go a day without hearing “Sleepwalking” on the radio. Yes, they’re getting radio play, and lots of it. While the broad-scale airing of their music should theoretically mean they have reached the pinnacle of their years of hard work, you and I know that all it really means is that All Time Low have finally shed any pretense of originality and musical craftsmanship in favor of glossy production, dull songwriting, and commercial success.
That doesn't mean it's all bad, it just means I knew what to expect: a lie.
You were probably expecting me to say something different there, so let me explain. Even at their absolute worst, All Time Low seemed like they were trying to have fun. Maybe they weren’t ever the gift to music that they wanted to be but they were having fun, and wanted you and me to have fun, and often times their music was fun.
Tell Me I'm Alive is a lie though, because it’s really only
pretending to be fun. It seems like it should be fun, it feels like it should be fun, but it’s actually as fun as shoveling snow or crawling through mud. Their new-found success is so shamelessly exploited that the record is as tasteful as a piece of cardboard dusted with sugar.
All of the components to make it enjoyable are there, but none of them actually do anything. No amount of perfectly placed catchy guitar lines or big choruses can make up for the lack of any effort. Even the tiniest moments when the band does seem to care are rendered meaningless by how bland the rest of it is. Like a cake that has all the ingredients but doesn’t go in the oven, or the friend whose idea of having fun is endlessly watching reruns of
Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?,
Tell Me I'm Alive provides absolutely nothing valuable to the world. I mean ***, even the ironically self-aware title screams how insipidly irrelevant this album is.
Talking about musicianship, lyrics, composition, etc., are all kind of pointless in the face of the pointlessness of this album. It's not even horrible; actually a lot of the ideas on here
could be good. They’re just not good, because they have about as much life as a corpse. The album goes through for forty-one(!) minutes not really offending but not accomplishing anything either. It just kind of... is. You could listen to it, feel a vague sense of having listened to a record, and then forget about its very existence just moments later.
Wait, what’s the name of this album again?
