Photo credit Ashley Osborn
If Paramore’s latest album – this year’s This Is Why – demonstrated what it sounds like when a beloved 2000s pop-punk matures tastefully nearly two decades after their debut, All Time Low’s newest offering Tell Me I’m Alive shows what happens when a band from the same time is still clinging on to nostalgia nearly 20 years later. The limitations of such a backward-looking approach become clear by the second track, “Modern Love,” which makes clear that lead singer and songwriter Alex Gaskarth’s idea of what is rebellious and dangerous remains unchanged from when he was writing songs as a teenager (“What would your mother say?!”). Similarly, “New Religion”’s attempts at subversion by intermingling religious and sexual language (“your sweat is my Holy water” and “your hips are the only altar”) might have seemed subversive two decades ago, but in the age of Sam Smith and Lil Nas X’s provocations, falls flat.
There are hints of a more lyrically compelling album, specifically a more lyrically honest album. On “Are You There?” Gaskarth gestures towards meaningful self-reflection and meditations on isolation and self-destructive behavior (“Where do you turn when the drugs run out // And it’s 3 AM and you’re coming down?”). Similarly, “The Way You Miss Me” suggests a breakup song that is deeper and more alarming than the band’s usual affair (“use my body against me”). But such ideas are never explored with any greater depth, leaving listeners to do most of the guesswork as to what these songs are actually getting at.
All Time Low is hardly a band known for its subtlety, but even long-time fans will surely be taken aback by the sheer maximalism of some of these songs. The opener “Tell Me Alive” begins sounding like something from a rock opera, with peppy, forceful repetitions of a single piano chord, as Gaskarth tells of his “trainwreck” life. Then, his voice enters a strange, autotuned falsetto before the song transitions into frenetic, sped-up, crunchy pop-punk. Alternately, “The Sound of Letting Go” fails for the opposite reason; rather than being too much, it’s too little – despite its title, it’s frustratingly restrained and unfeeling.
Tell Me I’m Alive‘s nadir and peak occur, somewhat jarringly, back to back. “Calm Down” is the LP at its worst – a scattershot and unfocused attempt at cultural commentary. Beginning with the always-dreaded rhyming of “mad” with “sad,” it sees Gaskarth throw out an assortment of popular, topical phrases – “bless this mess” and “thoughts and prayers” among them – without any sort of added commentary. Given his tone and past artistic statements, one assumes he is mocking such phrases, but once again, he is frustratingly leaving the guesswork to listeners. Elsewhere, the song’s attempts at politicking are just straightforwardly bizarre – as he cries “Microplastic submarines // Your body is not yours.” A more capable lyricist might expand on the line to make a statement about the confounding nature of 21st-century reality, but once again Gaskarth just lets the line sit – a confusing oddity awash in a sea of clichés.
Conversely, “English Blood // American Heartache” is one of the few points where the band feels connected to the charm of their best 2000s music. It’s a straightforward pop-punk song, but one that manages to avoid sounding like a retread of past glories. The song finds Gaskarth at his most vulnerable and confessional, as he declares, “There’s no changing who I was and you know exactly where I’ve been // But I know who I am and who I am is good enough for me.” It’s a shame that this sense of contentment, of newfound maturity and inner peace so rarely translates into the music of Tell Me I’m Alive.
Leave a Reply