In the ’90s, listening to bands like Sunny Day Real Estate or The Promise Ring felt like belonging to a secret society. The bands were wholesome enough, the songs poppy at heart. The entire fandom experience was nonetheless marked by an awareness that this music was by definition underground, deviant, and certainly way too cool for the radio.
This changed all at once in the early 2000s. The emo-hardcore scene (for lack of a better term) was embraced, not just by the Warped Tour’s broader world of pop-punk, but also by MTV and mainstream radio. Suddenly Saves the Day was appearing on Conan, Jimmy Eat World topping the charts on MTV’s TRL. Time magazine was publishing articles on “emo,” a term quickly coming to signify not a few bands you and your friends might like, but more of an aesthetic, present at lunch tables in high schools across the nation.
Taking Back Sunday at House of Blues Nov. 4.
Taking Back Sunday had the good fortune of emerging at this precise moment, blending emo’s edgier elements (distorted guitars, screaming) with uncanny pop sensibilities. Where their peers dabbled in sappiness and melodramaticism, lead singer Adam Lazzara (along with Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba) made an art of it, turning teenage insecurities and emotional immaturity into his calling cards.
Those words at best were worse than teenage poetry / Fragment ideas and too many pronouns / Stop it, come on, you’re not making sense now. -”Timberwolves at New Jersey,” Taking Back Sunday
On their debut album, Tell All Your Friends, this formula resulted in 10 instant anthems that, for the band’s fans, more or less encapsulated the entire dirty experience of being a teenager. The album serves as an exercise in indulgence, and it is for exactly this reason that it has aged so well. Where a comparable album — Brand New’s Your Favorite Weapon, for instance — may be diminished by the more juvenile lyricism, TAYF is only better for it.
As exercises in indulgence go, it doesn’t get much better than seeing Taking Back Sunday perform the entirety of their first album on its 10-year anniversary. It does not go unnoted that original guitarist/songwriter John Nolan is back in tow for the first time since TAYF. When Nolan left the band in 2003 to front his own band Straylight Run, he made it obvious in multiple songs that he had come to resent everything Lazzara and TBS stood for.
So we drove for what seemed like days / over roads and four-lane highways / We said all we had to say, and I realized in time that it didn’t mean anything. – “A Slow Descent,” Straylight Run
TBS kicks off the November 4 set at House of Blues with eight hits from their four later albums, hitting high points with “A Decade Under the Influence” and “MakeDamnSure.” The fans are palpably hungry by the time the band finally goes into TAYF’s album-opening guitar riff on “You Know How I Do.” The reaction is instant, high-pitched screams and hands in the air. People can’t, or won’t, contain themselves, swaying into the people around them. Someone pushes forward and sets off a chain reaction, the entire crowd now bumping into each other. We’re all screaming: “WE. WON’T. STAND. FOR. HAZY EYES ANYMOOOOOORE!!!” The crowd’s median age looks to be about 24, and yes, we all still know all the words.
Moreover, Lazzara still swings the mic like it’s 2002, still jumps into the crowd mid-song, exploring the venue like a curious 4-year-old as fans hold the microphone cable up like a tribute. His singing is slurred and off-key, each song a bit rushed.
And Nolan still holds it down, acting as band leader and counteracting Lazzara’s showmanship with his own professionalism. The balance works as well as it ever did. Ten years later, one can only hope that Nolan has learned to accept the band for what it is; the excesses that make Taking Back Sunday distasteful are precisely what make them great.
–Kerem Ozkan
