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Click cover to buy. Reviewed by Benjamin How do I begin? Well, I guess I could always tell you how they begin… with a 3-note start to a (roughly) 35-minute record. It’s clear and it’s concise (but it’s NOT punk); it cuts straight to the heart of the matter. And in this case, the heart IS the matter. “You Know How I Do” (the opener) kicks straight in with guitar. Then the drums fill out the sound and the listener is captured by the passionate vocals, which lead into the determined chorus of “we won’t stand for hazy eyes, anymore”. What did I tell you? It’s clear and it’s concise. Tell All Your Friends. From the get-go we know just what TBS are all about. Punky hard-hitting guitars, killer hooks, devastating lyrics, and intense breakdowns. Breakdown’s both musically and emotionally, I guess. The breakdown to “You Know How I Do” has the hook repeated, whilst the lead vocals sing (in a calm and reflective voice) “think of all the fun you’ve had for the finest line divides a night well spent from a waste of time…” Then comes the killer stand-up emo angst you’ve been waiting for (which whilst being emotional, also maintains a certain witness about it – I mean, check out the pun)… "He’s held up with holding on and on and on". They combine the best elements of everything to create an emocore-esque sound, which is both light enough to appeal to strictly pop-punk fans, and also heavy enough for those who like their music to have a certain edge about it. Take the second track for example: starts off as pure pop-punk, Blink-style, and then moves into crashing drums, intense octaves and high emotional vocals. And you know what the best bit is? That TBS retraces their steps and move even further back than the pop-punk into delicate female vocals before breaking into what I earlier defined as killer stand-up emo angst. So… enough detailed analysis of the tracks – I’ll now just give a general overview of the album. The lyrics of TAYF focus on heartbreak and yearning. The lyricist seems to apparently get nothing but unlucky breaks. It never goes right. In fact, it’s gone wrong so many times for this guy that now “hoping for the best [means] hoping nothing happens”. The album title is derived from the third track on the album, “Cute Without The ‘E’”, and the full line is actually “Will you tell all your friends / that you’ve got your gun to my head?” Thus showing that the lyricist firmly believes that having your heart belong to someone else means allowing them to hold a gun to your head. There’s also a darker side to the music of TBS. I mean, the lyrics seem to constantly devastate, but more often than not, the music is quite uplifting in a somewhat defiant manner. But on “There’s No ‘I’ In Team”, “The Blue Channel”, and “Head Club” the music suddenly turns dark and there’s nothing uplifting about it. Some people label Taking Back Sunday as a “screamo” band – if you only listen to those three songs, then that’s quite understandable. Angst comes out best in screams it seems. And what a tense ending to a song this is: “Best friends means I pulled the trigger / Best friends means you get what you deserve”. Those are the lyrics that are repeatedly screamed at the end of “There’s No ‘I’ In Team”. Tense or what? Oh, and yes, you thought right… it’s the gun metaphor again. Undoubtedly "Ghost Man On Third" is one of the best tracks (if not the best) on the album. Starting slow with a spacious drum-beat and sprawling guitar, and then climaxing in highly charged screaming of the line “at times like these silence means everything”. Then it breaks down and allows some more space via more spacious music and female vocals. Bop-ba-da-dum bop-ba-da-dum. Such nice female vocals are then disturbed by bursts of guitar, and you know something tense is coming next. And it does. These guys DO NOT disappoint. “This is what living like this does”. Indeed.
So why buy Tell All Your Friends? - Because… there’s a combination of styles on the record. For example…
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