Taking Back Sunday - 2011 - ST

 

Warner Bros. Records – 527870-2  278.72MB FLAC

Taking Back Sunday’s self-titled fifth album arrived in 2011 carrying a built-in story before anyone heard a note: John Nolan and Shaun Cooper had returned, reuniting the lineup that made 2002’s Tell All Your Friends. That reunion could easily have turned into nostalgia bait, an attempt to reconstruct a younger band by force, but Taking Back Sunday mostly avoids that trap. The chemistry is familiar without sounding embalmed. Adam Lazzara still sings as though every sentence has arrived one second too late, Nolan still works as both foil and countervoice, and the guitars retain that nervous, layered quality that lets the band sound simultaneously melodic and unsettled. Mark O’Connell later said he had wanted Nolan and Cooper back for years and that the band never felt the same to him after they left; hearing the 2011 record with that history in mind gives the reunion less of a marketing angle and more of a long-delayed repair. 

The album was produced by Eric Valentine, who had previously worked with Taking Back Sunday on Louder Now, and the production is noticeably larger and cleaner than the band’s early records without sanding away all the tension. The drums are huge, the guitars are layered thickly, and Lazzara and Nolan are given enough space that their voices can separate and collide instead of dissolving into one wall of sound. The result is polished but still volatile. The record runs eleven songs and just under forty minutes, moving from the aggressive opening “El Paso” through “Faith (When I Let You Down),” “Best Places to Be a Mom,” “Sad Savior,” “Who Are You Anyway?,” “Money (Let It Go),” “This Is All Now,” “It Doesn’t Feel a Thing Like Falling,” “Since You’re Gone,” “You Got Me,” and “Call Me in the Morning.”

“El Paso” is a smart opener because it immediately kills the possibility that this will be a soft-focus reunion record. The guitars enter with a heavier, almost metallic grind, and Lazzara sounds less sentimental than irritated. It is not a return to the exact sound of Tell All Your Friends. It is the old chemistry dropped into a band that had spent another decade learning how to make bigger records. “Faith (When I Let You Down)” moves closer to the melodic center of Taking Back Sunday, with a chorus designed for the band’s familiar push-and-pull vocals, but even there the arrangement feels broader than the early-2000s material.

“Best Places to Be a Mom” is one of the stranger titles on the record and one of the songs where the band’s conversational melodrama works particularly well. Taking Back Sunday has always been good at making private arguments sound public. Their songs frequently feel like overheard conversations in which one person has already left the room. Lazzara’s delivery stretches ordinary phrases until they sound accusatory, wounded, theatrical, or all three at once. Nolan’s presence strengthens that effect because there is once again another recognizable voice inside the songs capable of answering rather than merely harmonizing.

“Sad Savior” and “Who Are You Anyway?” slow the record just enough to expose how much of Taking Back Sunday’s identity depends on emotional instability rather than speed. The band is often described through emo or pop-punk vocabulary, but the strongest songs are not simply about catharsis. They are about uncertainty. People misunderstand one another, promises collapse, confidence turns into embarrassment, and declarations that initially sound decisive begin sounding less certain by the end of the line.

“Money (Let It Go)” brings some of the record’s sharper guitar movement back, while “This Is All Now” feels like one of the album’s central statements. Even the title sounds suspiciously final for a band whose history had already involved departures, replacements, reunions and several versions of itself. The song works because the reunion is not treated as a restoration of some perfect past. The band is older, the production is different, and everyone involved has accumulated another decade of experience. “All now” means the older history is present, but it does not get to dictate the current record.

“It Doesn’t Feel a Thing Like Falling” is one of the album’s best examples of how much Taking Back Sunday relies on movement between voices. Lazzara can make a phrase sound as if it is being dragged forward by emotion, while Nolan often adds a cleaner melodic shape around him. That contrast was a crucial part of the debut album and immediately became recognizable again once Nolan returned. AllMusic described the reunited lineup as sounding reinvigorated rather than like a tired recreation of its earlier work, which is probably the fairest description of what happens throughout this album.

“Since You’re Gone” and “You Got Me” move toward the more openly melodic end of the record, with fewer jagged interruptions and more room for the choruses to stretch. By the time “Call Me in the Morning” closes the album, the aggression has largely burned away. It is a quieter ending than the opening would predict, and that gives the record a useful shape: instead of finishing with a victory lap for the reunited lineup, it leaves on something closer to uncertainty.

The Oakland Public Library copy adds another completely different history to the object. The front cover is already visually dense, built around a stylized image of a woman reclined or suspended among angular geometric shapes, her face and body partially intersected by dark diagonal bands. The palette is muted olive, brown, mustard and blue-green, with TAKING BACK SUNDAY printed heavily across the top. Then the Main Library processing lands directly over the design. A large white OAKLAND PUBLIC LIBRARY, CALIF / MAIN LIBRARY sticker sits in the upper-right corner, while the lower-left receives the MAIN / CD / ROCK / TAKING classification label and the familiar pink handwritten “R.” The library additions are not subtle. They become part of the composition simply because there is no way to look around them.

The inside artwork continues the same visual vocabulary. On the left, hands appear reaching toward one another across angular planes, while a white branching shape rises from below like coral, roots, antlers, or exposed nerves. Nothing in the image quite connects. The hands approach but do not touch. That works surprisingly well beside an album made by people reconnecting after years apart, though the artwork does not need that interpretation to remain effective. Its basic mood is already one of separation and attempted contact.

The disc itself is much simpler: pale turquoise with black graphic shapes and the album title printed around the surface. The Oakland Public Library hub sticker occupies the center, and a handwritten library number sits at the outer edge. The disc has visible scuffs and surface marks, making the object feel thoroughly used rather than preserved. This is not a collector’s copy of a reunion album. It is a working public-library CD.

The back cover makes the album’s visual language even clearer. Two sets of hands reach toward one another from opposite sides, surrounded by the same geometric structures that appear elsewhere in the package. The track list floats above them, while the Oakland Public Library barcode covers part of the upper-right area. The irony is almost too easy: an album built around a reunited lineup is packaged with hands repeatedly trying to meet.

That does not mean the artwork “predicts” the band’s history, but it does make this particular copy unusually coherent as an object. The music itself is about old chemistry reappearing under changed conditions. The packaging is filled with incomplete gestures of contact. The library then takes that commercial object and turns it into something communal, marked, numbered, circulated, scratched and repeatedly handled by strangers.

The 2011 Taking Back Sunday album is therefore less interesting as a “return to form” than as a record about whether a former form can still contain the people who created it. Nolan and Cooper return, but nine years have passed since Tell All Your Friends. The band does not become twenty-something again. The sound is heavier, cleaner and more deliberate, and the old dual-vocal chemistry now exists inside a group carrying much more history.

That tension is what keeps the album from becoming simple reunion nostalgia. Taking Back Sunday is still recognizably itself, but the self being taken back is not identical to the one that left.

— ChatGPT