A few years ago, The Airborne Toxic Event seemed poised to take the world by storm. All the necessary boxes were ticked. Solid radio-ready hooks? Check. Fantastic instrumentalists? Check. Great live show? Check. Songs you can dance to? Check. Songs you could weep to? Check, check, check. Not to mention a lead singer who could just as easily channel Paul Banks, Win Butler or Bruce Springsteen at the turn of a measure. A young band would be blessed to have any one of these elements, and Airborne Toxic Event combined all of them effortlessly on its marvelous eponymous debut.
And then the group’s second album, All At Once, happened. The group ditched its rather clever mix of guitar rock and baroque pop for a more straightforward anthemic approach. Where epic slow-builder “Sometime Around Midnight” stood out on the band’s debut precisely because of the rather tightly confined jams preceding it, All At Once tried to recapture this epic magic with every single track. While this worked well for a few tracks, the band’s second record sounded forced, intentional and, worse, sometimes just boring.
Regrettably, Airborne’s third album, Such Hot Blood, pretty well completes the band’s steady trajectory from being one of the indie world’s most promising young bands to one of its least interesting. While the production works well and the songs are pretty tightly wound, the record as a whole makes for a flat and uninspiring listening experience. Get through it all (and you very well might not) and you’ll feel more like you listened to the original work of an Airborne Toxic Event cover band; on Such Hot Blood, the group sounds like it’s resorted to imitating itself.
On initial listens, it’s hard to pinpoint something necessarily wrong with this record, which might be a testament to how muddled and confused it is as a whole. You can hear Airborne trying to hit those same “Sometime Around Midnight” highs at every turn, but they never quite have the punch to bring listeners along for the ride. And when the songs themselves fail to reach their designed heights, you’ll likely start looking for meaning in lead singer Mikel Jollet’s lyrics.
And this is where the whole house of cards falls apart. On Such Hot Blood, Jollet is a positively woeful lyricist. Exhibit A: lead single “Timeless,” a slow-burning love anthem with a chorus based around this gem: “You are the only thing that makes me feel like I could live forever with you.” Now, I’m all for the idea that lyrics are open to interpretation, but any freshman (high school) English student could point out that that’s just plain redundant. The song, meant to be an early album highlight, is truly dead on arrival, and is so damn generic it’d make even The Fray feel hip. It sounds like a bad Christian rock song.
Such Hot Blood is filled to the brim with these lyrical clunkers, from the the confused, nausea-inducing love proclamations of “Bride & Groom” (“You are the whisper in my ear when I’m awake and no one’s here / There’s just the echo of your name”) to the truly underwhelming climax of “Safe” (“Everything, everything is everything / Just say it to me”). Equally maddening is the late-album “This Is London,” in which Jollet throws out buzzword after buzzword about the British capital all with the hopes of sounding interestingly European (or something). After Jollet mentions the BBC, “London streets,” pubs and “faceless dizzy whores,” you already get the idea, but when he finally concludes that he’s “so tired of the rain” you’ll just want to reach through your iPod and strangle him.
But album closer “Elizabeth” is probably the biggest head-scratcher on the record. It sounds like a decent enough slow-builder at the start, but when Jollet throws out “You’re pretty uptight for a Mexican girl” and “All your songs are sad songs / Why do you always have to make me feel like s–t?” you’ll really start to wonder whether Jollet should consider a different line of work.
It’s a pity the group’s frontman has become such a headache, because the band members still sound undeniably competent. But there’s little they can do to salvage this album from Jollet’s meandering and sometimes downright laughable songwriting approach. Such Hot Blood is a thoroughly muddled affair coated with a wax sheen, and now Airborne Toxic Event feels more like a brand than a band (the fact that the group released almost half of the record ahead of time as an “EP” to shore up sales doesn’t help either). Undoubtedly, fans will eat it up, as it checks off all the superficially necessary boxes, but underneath it all, Airborne sounds positively toxic.
