Review Summary: All At Once rings with the sound of unfulfilled promise from a band that has lost its greatest strength…the ability to make meaningful music.
When front man Mikel Jollett started writing music, his life was plagued by adversity. All within the same week, his girlfriend dumped him, his mother discovered she had cancer, and he was diagnosed with a genetic autoimmune disease that caused him spot baldness and skin depigmentation. The Airborne Toxic Event was his outlet; a cathartic journal in which he could put poetry to music. Not surprisingly, the band’s self-titled debut was a smash hit and it yielded one of 2008/2009’s most emotionally charged anthems, ‘Sometime Around Midnight.’ The success of the album, and that song in particular, caused a considerable buzz around The Airborne Toxic Event as the next big band in alternative rock. It came as a bit of a shock then that only three years later, their sophomore LP
All At Once was released to little fanfare. Unfortunately, there is not much here to suggest that this album will attract more attention in the future, let alone reach the lofty heights of its celebrated predecessor.
All At Once’s most noticeable flaw is the absence of sweeping string sections and orchestral backgrounds. If you look at the highlights that defined
The Airborne Toxic Event, you will notice that while the band is competent instrumentally, it was always the orchestral aspects that gave the album a sense of urgency and a unique emotional flair. On
All At Once, the band members seem content to stick to extremely basic instrumental outputs composed of simple back-and-forth drum beats and forgettable riffs. The lead single ‘Changing’ is a prime illustration of this, with a hip-swaying, head-bobbing little number that sounds more like a b-side from The Killers’
Hot Fuss than a vehicle to promote the band’s latest effort. The other mid-tempo and upbeat tracks don’t fair much better; ‘It Doesn’t Mean a Thing’ is a far less interesting variation of ‘Gasoline’, and ‘Welcome to Your Wedding Day’ meanders through vague, nonsensical lyrics and a chorus that, while catchy, feels forced and disjointed. Without the strings and other added frills, we are left with a basic alternative rock record, which is disappointing when you consider the expectations this band has created for itself.
So why drop the orchestra, strings, and to be quite blunt, all the
emotion? A casual listener might point the finger in the direction of general laziness, but unfortunately the problem appears to lie much deeper. Whereas on
The Airborne Toxic Event Mikel Jollett was immersed and invested in his lyrics and song crafting, this time he sounds strained, tired, and even flat out bored at times. While it may be ill-advised to imply that his born-out-of-tragedy sound has worn thin in the wake of recent lifestyle improvements, that could very well be the case. Success struck early with The Airborne Toxic Event’s very first record, and the heartbreaking events of that time period are now three years behind him. Jollett still tries to sound emotionally charged, but the fact that he has to
try is what makes it so painfully obvious. That blood-boiling bitterness and cynical crooning that we have come to expect from Jollett have been replaced by attempt after attempt to match a level of intensity that he simply can not attain, and only the most casual listener would mistake it for genuine passion. He still possesses the talent to anchor any indie band with his vocals, but the fact that he doesn’t sound as shattered or desperate as before detracts from the album’s emotional appeal.
The lyrics also fall rather flat here, exchanging the poetic nature of Jollett’s past for overly abstract sentiments and vague metaphors. Silly passages such as, “
You can dance on the graves and the bones of the children / If you know what to say / And you know its begun from the beat of the drum / And the screams from the mouths of babes” will compel listeners to pop in The Airborne Toxic Event’s earlier material, which actually had some perspective and a down to earth element that people could relate to. The vast majority of
All At Once is broadly stated, intangible, and unclear in terms of what it is Jollett is even talking about. Even when the messages do make sense, there is nothing that penetrating or profound. The ballad ‘All For A Woman’, which is sure to be a future single, offers us teenage poetry in the lines, “
She's lying asleep in your bed / And you're standing beside her / The light from inside her, filling the darkness in your head.” There may be nothing overtly wrong or offensively bad about the lyrics, but they simply don’t connect with the listeners…and that’s assuming it is one of the instances in which they are saying anything to begin with. All in all, it stands as just another aspect of
All At Once that pails in comparison to
The Airborne Toxic Event, and it complements the notion that Mikel Jollett’s inspiration may be have been left back in 2008.
All At Once is an overall failure in ambition. The Airborne Toxic Event have stripped things down, but in the process exposed their greatest weaknesses. The album is shallow compared to their debut, not nearly as catchy, and it brings almost nothing new to the table. The absence of orchestral backing, emotional vocals, and moving lyrics has also caused the band to lose a great deal of their personality.
All At Once is the definition of a sophomore slump, and one can only hope that Mikel Jollett and company will return to form. If they don’t find a way to play to their strengths again, The Airborne Toxic Event may end up being just another one-hit-wonder.
