Review Summary: This album is a grower, and has some real gems of power-pop, but it’s just not going to have the same impact as the soundtrack to 2005 that was Move Along.
The All-American Rejects’ 2005 release, Move Along, is something you
will have heard at some point. The anthemic, teen-angst title-track was all over MTV, and
that riff from Dirty Little Secret is engraved in stone as one of the defining moments of 21st century pop-rock. It was also a damn fine power-pop album which took all the best elements of their pop-punk self-titled debut – Tyson Ritter’s unmistakable vocals, broken power-chords and danceable beats to name but a few – polished them up a little bit, and put them to youthful, emotional, well-written pop songs.
When When The World Comes Down’s lead single Gives You Hell hit the airwaves, it became very apparent that this wasn’t going to be Move Along pt. 2. A sparse and repetitive track that took AAR into a domain of what you could term riot-pop, with a shouted chorus, a synth-led verse structure and gang vocals in the last refrain, it had a distinctly more restrained feel than the Rejects’ previous work, and that’s what WTWCD is all about
: it’s a band maturing and branching out from a safe formula.
Unfortunately, the parts at which it works are less frequent than Gives You Hell would have you believe. The consistency of Move Along is gone and this is an album that suffers from a severe case of schizophrenia; the (kind of) title-track is a cute acoustic number in the middle of the track listing, but instead of being a time-out, or a respite, it just interrupts the flow. There are duets (the genuinely fantastic and spine-tingling Another Heart Calls), old-style tunes (Breakin’ is the closest thing to anything off Move Along) and faintly African-sounding odes to bitterness (closer When The Wind Blows) here, but it ends up being less of an eclectic offering, and more of a mess.
The hooks are still here; Ritter’s vocals and his ability to construct a top-line melody are still in tact, but even they can’t stop filler songs like Believe from falling into obscurity. Atop that, the hooks don’t seem to carry the same potency or energy as the ones AAR are remembered for. Most of them gradually intoxicate you, but very few are scream-your-heart-out epics, and the ones that are seem muted and never really take off. There are violins and tribal drums and fractured riffs, all of which contribute to an easy-listening but mostly powerful sound, but again, they’re just not as instantly recognisable as you’d expect. The absence of any notable bass influence is conspicuous, but Ritter is on top vocal form, and the songs don’t really suffer rhythmically; granted, the failure of many tracks here to ‘explode’ is partly down to a sub-par drumming performance, but it’s got far more to do with the way the songs are constructed and transitions between verses and hooks.
Lyrically, it’s not much of a departure; it’s music about girls and broken hearts for the most part, although there are some pretty beautiful, if slightly clichéd moments, like Another Heart Calls’
‘Do you remember when we didn't care?/We were just two kids/That took the moment when it was there’. It’s not poetry but it fits the music well. There are slip-ups, like the awkward rhymes in Fallin’ Apart, but it mostly keeps the right side of the line between cheesy and generic. Quite why they feel the need to drop ‘g’s in two track titles escapes me, but it’s certainly more of a conscious decision than something they didn’t think about enough. If anything, WTWCD sounds like it’s been thought about too
much. Obviously, deliberating over your sound is not a bad thing, but when it’s done as messily as it is here, you have to wonder whether they would have been better sticking to the patterns that brought them into the mainstream four years ago. There’s enough here to listen to, and enough to back for a second time, and there are some genuinely striking moments on this record, but they’re much fewer and farther between than Move Along. It’s disappointing, because AAR don’t sound like a band in transit with a stunning destination, but more one that really wants to go a million places at once and ends up standing still for far too long deciding.
When I was streaming this on the band’s MySpace for the fifth time, trying to find something transcendent or magical about an album I had waited for so long to hear, I suddenly found myself knowing the words to a song and tapping my feet like the old days, and then I realised that the new album had finished and the MySpace track listing had run into Dirty Little Secret. This album is a grower, and has some real gems of power-pop, but it’s just not going to have the same impact as the soundtrack to 2005 that was Move Along.
The album is streaming at http://www.myspace.com/allamericanrejects
