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(Fair warning: this is less a “review” than “ramblings of an excited fanboy.” But I suppose you could say that about most of the things I write.)<\/p>\n
If you read the “articles” I posted back in January about the music I listened to the most in 2012, you may recall that last year I got myself really into a band called Tonight Alive. What Are You So Scared Of?<\/em> was -by a very wide margin- my most listened-to and favourite album of the year, and I still spin it (figuratively, I’ve only used the disc to rip the songs to my PC and 360) fairly often.\u00a0I’d absolutely consider the Australian band to be one of my recent\u00a0favourites.<\/p>\n Over the last few months, I’ve been absolutely frothing with demand for their second album, The Other Side<\/em>. It finally dropped on September 10th, and I couldn’t have asked for a better belated birthday present. I was on vacation last week, and it’s the only music I bothered to listen to the entire time (radio during car times notwithstanding).<\/p>\n Seriously, I listened to that thing like\u00a0six times\u00a0last Friday. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve gotten myself so worked up\u00a0about an album. A new<\/em> album anyway. I listened the crap out of Queen’s The Miracle<\/em> when\u00a0my years-long\u00a0search for a copy came to a close last year.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The Other Side<\/em> is basically exactly what I love to hear in a new album: It’s got all the elements of Tonight Alive that made me fall in love with them, but it really doesn’t sound much like their previous works. For the most part, What Are You So Scared Of?<\/em> was much more youthful and energetic, where The Other Side<\/em> shows a lot more deliberation and seriousness. That’s not to say that it’s like one of those boring, stuffy indie albums. Not at all. There’s still plenty of life in this album,\u00a0and at the same time\u00a0it is certainly deeper than its predecessor.<\/p>\n Jenna McDougall’s vocals in particular are what attracted me to the band in the first place, and she does not disappoint at all. I thought she was a pretty great singer before, but she has gotten even better over the last year. Her voice is immediately familiar, but also shows a little more maturity in her style, spending more time in a slightly deeper range than I’m used to hearing from her. Hell, she uses a whole lot more\u00a0range in general.\u00a0Though she still throws in a few super-girly squeaks in here and there, which delights me wild ways. It’s hardly the\u00a0evolution in vocal style that Hayley Williams\u00a0showed between Riot!<\/em> and Brand New Eyes<\/em>, but you can definitely hear Jenna refining her talent.<\/p>\n I’ll admit that I feel a little bad making a comparison to Paramore there, because I’ve seen far too many people just write off Tonight Alive as an Australian equivalent or copy of Paramore, but that’s so far from the truth. In fact, taken as a whole, The Other Side<\/em> doesn’t immediately remind me of any other bands or albums at all.\u00a0The tone and\u00a0pacing of the first verse of “Come Home”\u00a0inexplicably gives me a bit of a vague Taylor Swift vibe (“State of Grace” maybe? I can’t really place it), but shakes it off as soon as the chorus comes around, and I find the overall sound of the album to be very distinct. At the very least, it sounds like nothing else that I’ve ever listened to.<\/p>\n If you need a sample of what you’re getting from The Other Side, I’ll embed the video for the second single from the album, “Lonely Girl,” which may not be the best track on the album, but is probably the catchiest. At least it’s the one I’ve been singing to myself all week.<\/p>\n