This is me with the words on the tip of my tongue and my eye through the scope down the barrel of a
...gun

I try not to be a music elitist in general. I scorn people who react that a band has "sold out" or who disdain anything mainstream.

But Taking Back Sunday... it's a really odd situation for me. Their major label debut was their third album, Louder Now, which was also presumably their chance to make it big as a mainstream act. I saw them live in my first year of uni before that album was even on the horizon. My Chemical Romance, who obviously are massive now, were supporting them. I hadn't heard of MCR, but in the months (and years) after that I certainly heard a lot of them.

The thing is though... Taking Back Sunday's third album sucked. Their first two albums, the ones when they were small enough to play at the Refectory in Leeds but big enough that a major up-and-coming band like MCR could still support them, had a really distinctive sound that I absolutely love. On a basic level it's pretty much pop punk like any other band does, but two vocalists layered witty lyrics over each other in different ways - sometimes harmonies, sometimes alternating and playing off each other, and sometimes entirely different melody lines running counterpoint. Meanwhile, the songs were good, solid pop music with memorable choruses, without always being slaves to a verse/chorus/verse/chorus structure. Everything clicked. And as an added touch, the song titles are hilariously, self-consciously emo-tastic, with names like "Timberwolves at New Jersey" and "Set Phasers to Stun" that bear no obvious relation to the songs themselves. It was quirky and fun.

Most importantly, every song on both their first two albums is a classic. There's pretty much nothing I would call filler. Every song begs you to listen to it again.

Their third album, Louder Now, pretty much lacks all the qualities I mentioned above. All of them. There are a few good songs, but it's mostly just generic rock music, and most tracks have a bland chorus that consists of the song title repeated over and over (and over) again, which I think is pretty unacceptable no matter what your approach to popular music. It feels like they completely lost track of what their sound was and what they were trying to do with their music, and they replaced it with random boring whatever. And thus they blew their chance at being a major, mainstream force to be reckoned with*, while I sat there wishing more people had listened to their first two albums.

(* Yes, I realise it was probably much more complex than that, and that there were lineup changes and such.)

Why did I bring this up? Basically, I've spent the past two days listening to Taking Back Sunday's brand new fourth album, New Again, which is a massive improvement on Louder Now but still lacks the clever use of two vocalists from the first two albums. (It's such a large difference that I feel it must have been a conscious one. They can't have not noticed that this was such a major part of their earlier work and yet is completely absent from their current work. I don't understand they would make such a decision, but you know, artists do strange things. But I digress.) I like it, anyway. I think it's a good album with some brilliant tracks on it.

What I object to is this. The "must-have album" is Louder Now? The song you hope they play is boring crap like "What’s It Feel Like To Be A Ghost"? DID YOU EVER LISTEN TO ANY OF THEIR MUSIC BEFORE 2006???

And thus I feel like a horrible elitist.