Review Summary: You don't need to get Louder Now Taking Back Sunday, you need to get Better Now.
After the high point of Where You Want to Be the tension was on Taking Back Sunday to make a great next album. Interestingly enough they didn't lose any crucial members this time like from Tell All Your Friends to Where You Want to Be and that gave me hope. It gave me hope that Louder Now, the third album in Taking Back Sunday's discograpy would be their best yet. Fred and Adam had time to own those vocal harmonies to perfection and several years of writing to get the songs just perfect. But did they succeed? No not really. While this isn't the worst album in their collection (Hello Tell All Your Friends and especially New Again) it might be the most disappointing for me personally, in my opinion.
Let's go over the good things about this album first. First of all the vocals on it are quite good and really the production overall has improved even over the good production of Where You Wanna Be. The vocals are all crisp and clear and Adam sounds better than ever and so does Fred, even though he's barely used on the album. That's actually one of my big problems...it doesn't feel like Taking Back Sunday without lots of vocal trading, and this album doesn't have much of it (and New Again somehow has even less!) which really hurts the album for the worse. Another thing that hurts the album is the songs themselves. Unlike Tell All Your Friends that had pretty catchy songs but bad production, this is the opposite. There's no catchiness here except for a couple tracks. And, from a poppunk band, that is entirely unaccepted.
What's It Feel Like to Be a Ghost?? is probably the worst opener yet, managing to be ever worse than You Know How I Do, and that's a pretty big accomplishment, so props to the boys on that one. But then come the album's two good songs Liar [It Takes One to Know One] and MakeDamnSure. Even though their titles are really stupid and Fall Out Boy ish, these two songs are what save this album from a 1.5. They're pretty catchy and have some great vocals and writing. Its too bad that the rest of the album is very much junk. For example, Up Against [Blackout] is awful and more annoying than catchy and Error Operator is catchy but too repetitive, and I'll Let You Live is just a damn weird and out of place closer. All in all unless you are a hardcore Taking Back Sunday fan with an opened mind, I wouldn't really bother checking this one.
