Alkaline Trio have long held the privilege of being a quiet success story; they’ve shifted a lot of albums to a lot of die-hard fans over the years, but they’ve never become household names or MTV darlings. Sixth studio album Agony & Irony sees them belt out the same pacey angsty punk rock tunes as always, but it’s their first time on a major label – have they finally sold out to the man?
Well, the music is still pretty much Alkaline Trio as we’ve always known them: simple chord progressions and song structures, sparse energetic rhythms and lyrics about life’s more baffling and depressing moments. What’s noticeably different about Agony & Irony is the slick production job courtesy of Josh Abraham; thankfully he hasn’t turned them into another cookie-cutter MySpace band, but there’s a distinct radio-friendly gloss to the tunes that - for me at least - detracts from the appealing rawness of their earlier material.
Agony & Irony shares some sonic qualities with the legions of haircut bands, but that has more to do with Alkaline Trio being a huge influence on them than trying to retrospectively fit themselves into the market. The maturity of Matt Skiba’s songwriting sets them far apart as well. Sure, he sings about dysfunctional relationships and unrequited loves, substance abuse and bad habits … but the songs are defined by experience. There’s always been an authentic honesty to Skiba’s material that can’t be achieved by watching docudramas on cable.
And it makes a huge difference. “Over And Out” is musically unimpressive, for example, but its catalogue of depressions have a ring of truth to them that doesn’t rely on histrionic overstatement, and that authenticity lends the weight of authority to an otherwise uninspired song. Alkaline Trio have long known that there’s no need to make up bleak stories; the real world will supply you with more of them than you’ll ever want, whether you ask it to or not.
So Agony & Irony is no black parade – and you can thank whatever deity you prefer for that particular mercy. A song like “Live Young, Die Fast” may sound fatalist at a first listen, but it’s really the sound of a band who’ve been through that feeling and come out the other side again - the important word in the album title is ‘irony’. Alkaline Trio still stamp black humour into their work, too; the rattle-trap rhythms and ironic asides of “In Vein” and subverted pop chorus of “Love Love, Kiss Kiss” have the subtlety and barbed insight that Green Day had at their peak.
And much like Green Day, Alkaline Trio seem to be reaching the point in their career where the hard work pays off and converts into potentially broad appeal - Agony & Irony is certainly an album whose time is now, despite the fact that they’ve been making this noise for a decade. The question is whether Alkaline Trio will be heard over the clamour of the clones who’ve ripped them off.
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Posted in Music reviews |
Tags: Agony & Irony, Alkaline Trio, pop, punk, rock
