Alkaline Trio
This Addiction
Release Date: Feb 23, 2010
Genre(s): Rock, Alternative, Punk
Record label: Heart & Skull/Epitaph
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Album Review: This Addiction by Alkaline Trio
Very Good, Based on 4 Critics
Based on rating 8/10
Album seven and everything is new again for Alkaline Trio... Album seven and everything is new again for Alkaline Trio; a new label (their own), a new album and a newly single guitarist / vocalist in Matt Skiba, who has recently opened up to Rock Sound and revealed that his painful divorce provided both the concept and the substance for the 11 songs on ‘This Addiction’. Skiba has described the album as a return to the band’s roots and on the surface it appears that he’s right as the band recorded it in Chicago with producer Matt Allison, the man behind the band’s early material.
Based on rating 6.5/10
As far as pop-punk goes, I’d be hard-pressed to find many bands more successful in terms of popularity or quality as the Alkaline Trio. Formulaic as they may be, they’ve made quite the impressive place for themselves in the world out of diligent touring and some serious power-pop complexity. Predictably brimming with punk flourishes and memorably melodic hooks, This Addiction -- the band’s seventh full-length, and first to be co-released on their own label, Heart & Skull -- finds the trio playing to its usual strengths, but carefully harkening back to a more direct, and, perhaps (arguably) more genuine point in their career.
Based on rating 6/10
For anyone with even a passing familiarity with the Alkaline Trio, it will come as very little surprise that the band has chosen their 13th year to make a return to their early form. This Addiction marks the seventh full-length release from the band and it finds the threesome at a point of reckoning. The last couple of records had much more in common with late period Sisters of Mercy than the Misfits meets Naked Raygun punk rock garnered by their early success.
Opinion: Mediocre
On February 23rd, Chicago based Alkaline Trio put out their seventh album titled This Addiction and it’s their worst one to date. The band has released four albums on Asian Man Records, one on Vagrant, one on Epic, and This Addiction on Epitaph. Also under their wings are a few splits, opening slots for Green Day and My Chemical Romance, exclusive Hot Topic singles, and their own label, Heart & Skull.
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