The Used
Artwork
Release Date: Sep 1, 2009
Genre(s): Rock, Alternative
Record label: Reprise
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Album Review: Artwork by The Used
Mediocre, Based on 2 Critics
Based on rating 6/10
Focus on the artwork, as the Used are telling you via the title of their fourth album. It's an ugly beast of a picture of a man shoving a syringe labeled "ART" into an arm bearing "WORK" scrawled in blood on it. What it all means is unclear -- is art being injected into work, is art the drug -- but what is evident is that the Used still take all this emotional bloodletting very, very seriously indeed.
Based on rating 3/10
Youngish nasally-affected dudes from the suburbs, with an ear for a big chorus and an angst-ridden, deeply affected, well, everything. That sums up the Used quite efficiently, but here’s the kicker: it could also sum up any number of their generic Warped Tour peers. Ever since Gerard Way made a generation of neurotic teenagers swoon with his pretty melodrama, the rock world has seen wave upon wave of this not-quite metal, not-quite punk, not-quite anything alternative movement.
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