Review Summary: The final nail in the coffin. Ooh, how dark.
You’ve just got to feel for them. Things were going so well for Bert McCracken and his band of seldom-merry men, The Used, just a few years ago. McCracken was an idol to the black-clad, angst-ridden masses, and songs like “The Taste of Ink” (from their 2002 self-titled) and “All That I’ve Got” (from 2004’s
In Love and Death) became fist-pumping anthems as well as well-charting singles.
But before any misguided sixteen-year-old cried “voice of our generation”, the unthinkable happened: The kids themselves moved on and grew up. Unfortunately, the band themselves didn’t do the same. Lacking both founding drummer Branden Steineckert and a palpable target audience, the Used were in quite the precarious position.
While their former market clutched on to their copies of
The Black Parade, the Used tried to regain attention with their third album,
Lies for the Liars. Despite a couple of strong tracks, the album ultimately sank without a trace. If anything was going to be make or break for the Used, it would be their fourth album. Receiving sporadic updates from newsletters and MySpace etc., feelings about what would happen to the band were mixed. They could easily have created something raw, heartfelt, emotional (no, not “emo”, no matter what Rolling Stone tells you) in a vein similar to their near-perfect debut. Conversely, they could also continue to wonder down the shiny path of contrived, stadium-groping guitar-heavy pop that began to show its signs on
In Love and Death.
We all knew they were going to do the latter, some of us were just too scared to admit it.
Artwork is hollow, anachronistic and forced. There is very little on the album to entice listeners back for repeated listens, and there’s essentially nothing new on offer. This time around it’s a batch of thrown-together hooks, not exuberant passion, that are the driving force behind the record. To make matters worse, each and every verse feel like futile attempts to fill the void in-between the choruses – most of which turn out to be tail-chasing duds anyway. At their best, they are slightly catchy with some passable harmonies – McCracken, for all his nasal-whine faults, still hits home melodies with the best of his contemporaries (see the semi-worthwhile cuts “Born to Quit” and “The Best of Me”). At their worst, they cross into the tearing-of-own-hair territory of irritation – once or twice is fine, guys; not four or five.
It’s difficult to find saving grace anywhere on the album. The fact that Quinn Allman can now afford better guitar pedals to achieve crunchier tone cannot disguise the fact he’s lost his penchant for quick-paced, energetic riffs (“Take It Away”, “I Caught Fire”, “The Ripper”), along with his ability to string together listenable chord progressions. Meanwhile, the rhythm section have essentially turned into a glossy mess of four-on-the-floor stomp and root-note chugging. The worst offender here, however, is easily McCracken. The fact that this album sees his worst vocal performance yet aside, there’s just something ridiculously disconcerting about a man in his mid-twenties penning self-hate diatribe like an acne-prone teenage wimp. Bad lyrics before have certainly been apparent from the group in their past outings (anyone remember “You lied to the angels/So I stabbed you to death”?); but it’s starting to get ridiculous. Everything from “I haven’t lost anything except my mind” (“Empty With You”) up to “You can go tell your mom/That men are all the same” (“Men Are All the Same”) is exactly the kind of cringe-inducing bollocks someone trying to
parody the Used would come up with – not the ACTUAL Used.
If there’s one track here that manages to bring together everything that is wrong with what the Used have become, it would have to be the now-obligatory lighter ballad “Kissing You Goodbye”. A mainstay of each record from the band, they have gradually devolved from career highlight (“On My Own”), to highly likable (“Lunacy Fringe”), to painful to get through (“Smother Me”); right down to this. Sickly-sweet piano, echoing reverb, drums that wouldn’t be out of place in a Journey song…the fall from grace this band has suffered can be summarised in this embarrassing attempt at an “I love you baby”, hands-in-the-air singalong. It’s utterly artificial; a genuinely ugly piece of music that should have been left on the special section of the cutting room floor where a trapdoor opens into the pits of Hell.
Sorry, boys and girls, but this right here is the final straw. After years of trying to keep their head above water, we are now about to see the Used sink without a trace - and they've got no-one but themselves to blame. Somewhere in the world right now, on the road with Rancid, you can rest assured Steineckert has a s
hit-eating grin plastered all over his face at the thought that he got out before this once-great band released this.
