Taking Back Sunday
Tidal Wave
Release Date: Sep 16, 2016
Genre(s): Emo, Pop/Rock, Alternative/Indie Rock, Emo-Pop, Punk-Pop, Screamo
Record label: Hopeless Records
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Album Review: Tidal Wave by Taking Back Sunday
Very Good, Based on 4 Critics
Based on rating 4.0/5
Review Summary: There’s always a way back from your regrets.Taking Back Sunday boasts far from a perfect resumé. As we’ve witnessed an almost equal number of ups and downs throughout their discography, there has always been something endearing about their inability to get their shit together. There’s a human quality attached to these guys that almost can’t be described; a grittiness that has allowed them to survive multiple lineup changes and even a few instances of falling out of favor with their fans.
Based on rating 3.5/5
Taking Back Sunday is a band I've aged with with each release. Tell All Your Friends and Where You Want To Be caught me in the high school/university period in my life and struck every chord of teenage angst that I had in me. Adam Lazzara was everything I wanted to be. Louder Nowcame along and eventually represented that shift into young adulthood.
Based on rating 7/10
The seventh studio long-player from the emo/alt-rock veterans, Tidal Wave is the much anticipated follow-up to 2014's chart-topping Happiness Is. Written during Taking Back Sunday's olympic stretch of shows in support of their previous outing, the 12-track album incorporates elements of Americana into the group's signature blend of heartland punk and lighter-melting stadium rock, resulting in their most mature and diverse -- yet seamless -- set of songs to date. Built around the rousing "Fences" and the eponymous lead single, a fiery two-and-a-half-minute blast of socially and melodically charged mayhem that invokes Bruce Springsteen by way of the Ramones, Tidal Wave sees Taking Back Sunday pay homage to their emo roots without falling back on destructive habits.
Based on rating 6/10
There's a lot going on throughout Taking Back Sunday's seventh album, but it'll probably end up being best remembered as their '80s heartland-rock album, on which they decided to channel the likes of Tom Petty, John Mellencamp and Bryan Adams. This is a band that wrote a formula long ago and have pretty much stuck with it, resulting in good, energetic but somewhat prosaic alt-rock in the years following their emotive 2002 debut, Tell All Your Friends. The polished sound with a slight edge they've honed since then is plenty recognizable here, but also shaped by some newly tapped influences.
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