Review Summary: A good mainstream rock album, elevated by its energy but held back by mostly generic songwriting.
You know what’s great about a band like Foo Fighters? Their relentless energy. If there’s one thing the band’s got going for them, it’s that. Even their newer material, while not up to the same high standards set by their 90s and early 2000s work, is still some way above the vast majority of popular mainstream rock acts. It is perhaps for this reason that they are one of the most consistently imitated bands in the genre. The problem is, many bands just aren’t able bring the same level of passion and liveliness to their work and end up with a bunch of boring songs with soft verses and loud choruses.
TALIA are a band split between Paris, France and Los Angeles, USA who are clearly able to bring this energy when they want to. Their sound is similar to that of other post-grunge acts such as Feeder and Hole, and like those two groups they successfully manage to bring some of the dynamism required of their songs.
Thugs They Look Like Angels is the group’s third album and there is certainly a sense of maturity flowing through these tracks. While sometimes skirting dangerously close to being flat-out generic, for the most part these songs are quite memorable. The opener “American Bride” is perhaps the best example of this, with loud guitars, vibrant drumming and a catchy chorus all leading to a very successful 3 minutes of radio rock. It’s followed by a slower tune (“Play Dead”) with a sickeningly unforgettable chorus – perhaps bordering on the annoying kind, but not quite – that shows the band doesn’t need to be going at full tilt all the time to make an impact. Elsewhere, “Over the Line” and the closer, “Bounty Killers”, are proof that the second half of the album isn’t going to fade away into nothingness.
Sadly, though, some of the album isn’t able to rescue itself from its by-the-numbers songwriting. Tracks such as “Johnny Bait” and “Self Induced Fever” are frustratingly bland, with little separating them from the aforementioned legions of Foo Fighters clones out there. Likewise, a song such as “High Strung” really could have had a bit more bite to it. So often it sounds like the band has the potential to be that little bit louder and more dangerous than their contemporaries, but they fail to truly reach it. Instead, they settle on a standard structure and allow the melodies to do the work for them. This is not an altogether bad thing; the bottom line is that the band plays this style well and there is no real need to deviate from it. However, it’s hard to imagine TALIA becoming a household name doing something that plenty of other bands have already done before (and better) plenty times before in the past, and it would certainly be interesting to see what they could do by experimenting a little bit and pushing themselves beyond their comfort zone.
While
Thugs They Look Like Angels is a very good mainstream rock album, it suffers from a number of glaring flaws that hold it back from being anything truly special. The band are clearly competent musicians with a strong ear for melody, but their unwillingness to deviate from what they know keeps the music grounded, never allowing it to truly take off into the stratosphere. If TALIA are able to break the shackles and attempt something a little more daring on their next effort, combined with their strong sense of melody and energetic playing, they have the potential to produce a really strong album. For now, though,
Thugs They Look Like Angels is a good effort and one of the better additions to the post-grunge brand of mainstream rock.
