Review
Take Them On, On Your Own
(Virgin)
Release Date: 09/02/2003 12:00
Reviewed by Jonah Weiner
“I’m in love without you,” Robert Turner repeats on “We’re All in Love,” wafting in a druggy guitar haze. Nailing a noncommittal, anesthetized cool, the BRMC frontman never gives himself entirely. He’s a kid looking for a cause, but he’s skeptical, too (“I’m looking for something to shout/Something I know I cannot doubt”), so he contradicts himself, plays with words and twists aphorisms into knots. Half the time this works; elsewhere he comes off as fumbling, if not masturbatory. Sometimes it’s moot, when he’s buried in the wall-of-sound scuzz that muffles even the most barbed riffs here. Throughout, the dark spaciousness that boosted BRMC’s uneven 2001 debut is replaced with garage-rock fist-pumpers, which are all catchy but cramped. They’ve lost the knack for the former: The down-tempo “Shade of Blue” has one beautiful moment where moody plodding gives way to cathartic ribbons of guitar, but then gets back to rambling.
GUIDE SEARCH

BROWSE ARTISTS
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z #
THE SCORE
blender newsletter
 
Customer Service | Contests | Terms & Conditions | Privacy | Talk to Blender | Dear Superstar | Newsletter Signup | RSS Feeds | Digital Advertising | Magazine Advertising
Maxim Digital. Blender® is a registered trademark owned by Alpha Media Group Inc.