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On its sophomore album, All At Once, the Airborne Toxic Event reaches back into its bag of tricks for a more orchestral sound – unfortunately, more often than not, this approach finds the group coming up empty-handed.
From the moment the album begins, Airborne Toxic Event attempts to focus more on the sound that propelled “Sometime Around Midnight” to mainstream consciousness. Gone are the angular guitar hooks of its debut – instead, the band has been replaced with driving, dramatic songs that build slowly and steadily.
All At Once‘s opener and title track employs this sound. It’s a decent way to open the album, but one can’t help but feel that the band has already made a better version of this song, and any educated indie listener will hear it as a cripplingly mainstreamed version of Arcade Fire’s “Antichrist Television Blues”.
As a result, the opening track simply doesn’t have the emotional impact the band thinks it does, and at over five minutes long, it undeniably overstays its welcome.
Other tracks sound similarly overblown. “All For a Woman” has a promisingly tender, subdued opening but its Queen-like anthem pummels to death any earnestness the track may have had – it’s a silly direction for the song to take, and it insults the intelligence of the listener. Same goes for “The Kids Are Ready To Die,” a shameless Springsteen rip-off that comes off more pastiche than tribute.
It’s quite clear that Jollett thinks himself a more profound lyricist than he actually is, attempting either to cleverly invent narratives in the third-person or ruminate on issues far bigger than he – an odd approach for a guy whose band got famous with a song about bumping into your ex-girlfriend and getting drunk.
It is no real surprise, then, that the best tracks on All At Once are those with a more down-to-earth lyrical approach.
The second track, “Numb,” features a similar build as the opening track, but, by being more concise and dynamic, is far more impressive.
“All I Ever Wanted” has a wonderfully simple and romantic chorus backed by an energetic string section, though it admittedly takes a bit too long to get there.
The third track and lead single, “Changing,” is practically a compendium of the things this band does well: bouncy drum fills, interplaying guitars, and a relentlessly catchy hook give “Changing” a sound that is reminiscent of Airborne’s former work, but unquestionably more mature and well-calculated. This is the kind of progression that All At Once should have been.
Undoubtedly the best of the bunch is “Half of Something Else,” a beautiful, tender love song that sounds like the thematic antithesis of “Sometime Around Midnight,” but packs a comparable emotional punch. The song almost makes you forget the rest of the album’s weaknesses. Almost.
All At Once, then, has some impressive moments, but regrettably seems to be plagued with a sort of lyrical tension, wavering between genuine introspection and clichéd melodrama.
It’s quite odd this tension even exists, given the personal adversity Mikel Jollett experienced while writing the album – the loss of four close family members within one year.
Jollett may believe he’s created this kind of album in All At Once, but, from a listener’s perspective, this album simply proves that such an approach requires more than melodrama polished to a mirror sheen by a Grammy award-winning sound technician. An album like this needs more than just big choruses. It needs guts.
Unfortunately, guts are something that, on its second album, the Airborne Toxic Event seems to have lost.
