Taking Back Sunday Tell All Your Friends CD

Emo-Rock From Long Island

Talking Back Sunday: Ed Reyes, Mark O'Connell, Shaun Cooper, John Nolan, Adam Lazzara.
Engineers: Erin Farley, Tim Gilles, Arun Venkatesh.
Tell All Your Friends is quite reminiscent of the Movielife's This Time Next Year. This is quite understandable when one realizes that one of the members of Taking Back Sunday used to be in the Movielife. Unfortunately, although there are a few variations, the ability of this band to sound so blatantly like their fellow Long Island comrades is almost their undoing. Vocally, Taking Back Sunday sounds very close to the Canterbury Effect, while musically there are times where they're a bit more rockin' than the Movielife in that they have cultivated punk, hardcore, emo, and pop and hybridized it better. It's quite upbeat and very danceable, thus making it fun and interesting. Yet at the same time it's nowhere near to being original or creative. Perhaps within their genre they're creative, but for the most part, bands like Taking Back Sunday seem to be all too common in an age of acts like the Movielife, New Found Glory, and other hardcore/pop-punk acts. ~ Kurt Morris
Long Island emo crew Taking Back Sunday are an authentic grass-roots phenomenon. They built their following from the ground up, by touring with the likes of the Alkaline Trio and At The Drive-In, and while it took their debut album TELL ALL YOUR FRIENDS the better part of a year to make its way into the Billboard charts, it did so without the benefit of major-label backing. In classic emo fashion, TBS mixes punk energy, pop smarts, and a whole lot of youthful angst. While there are blazing guitars and light-speed drums aplenty to be found here, things never get overbearing. The addition of clever production touches like the female vocal descant on "Bike Scene" and the atmospheric guitar and keyboard intros to some of the more frenetic tunes shows that there's more to Taking Back Sunday than fire and fury.