Taking Back Sunday

Spin - "TAKING BACK SUNDAY emphasizes the band's crafty songwriting....More emo bands could use choruses as handsomely sculpted as those in 'You Got Me' and 'Call Me in the Morning'..." Alternative Press - 4 stars out of 5 -- "John Nolan and Shaun Cooper have brought in that much-needed lightning which sets some of these tracks off like no TBS song has since the early days..."

Featuring the lineup from the band's 2002 debut, Tell All Your Friends, Taking Back Sunday head back to the beginning with an eponymous album. Recorded with Queens of the Stoneage producer Eric Valentine, the album promises to be their heaviest yet.|

Reuniting the lineup from their debut album, 2002’s Tell All Your Friends, Taking Back Sunday seek to recapture the fire of that early lineup on their eponymous fifth album. Nearly a decade later, we find the post-hardcore outfit a little older and a little wiser, but sounding no worse for the wear, with John Nolan and Shaun Cooper sliding back into the lineup as if they had never left. The pair’s seamless return works in the band’s favor, reinvigorating their sound with the chemistry that brought them to the national stage without being a tired retread of things they’ve already done. In a lot of ways, Taking Back Sunday is the sophomore album the band never had. Songs like “El Paso” and “You Got Me” find the band both refining and expanding their sound, offering up tighter songs without sacrificing intensity in the process. The big surprises on the album come by way of the highly danceable “Money (Let It Go),” where deep fuzz bass and stomping drums blast their way through a garage-influenced dancefloor scorcher, and “This Is All Now,” which drifts back and forth between a verse anchored by an angular, Dismemberment Plan-style beat and a classic, singalong-style chorus. Normally, you’d expect a band to gain new members in order to inject this kind of life into their sound, and with three albums and seven years passing between Nolan and Cooper’s exodus and return, it’d be an easy point to argue that they almost are new members. What their return does bring, though, is that unquantifiable “getting the band back together” feeling and all of the excitement that comes with old friends getting back together to do what they do best. ~ Gregory Heaney