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Love
February 14, 2010
Geffen Records
Angels & Airwaves' third studio album Love was made available this weekend, half of a music/film multimedia experience that the band has been hyping as the second coming of musical Christ for as long as one can recall.
With two successful albums under their belt, it's safe to say that Angels & Airwaves have established themselves outside of the Blink 182 umbrella, but there's no avoiding the comparisons once frontman Tom DeLonge opens his mouth on tape. His AVA delivery sounds like that of a class-clown jokester who's realized that everyone's laughing at him and not with him, and is trying his damnedest to put forth some substance of heart before we collectively pull the shades of giving a damn. It's worked, to a degree, but as Blink's recent reunion will confirm, the douchey prankster role is much more lucrative.
Of Love, DeLonge said, "It is the biggest release of my life, the pinnacle of my creativity. It's super conceptual and highbrow in many ways, very artistic, very Stanley Kubrick, but it's not a rock opera. It's a very modern version of what could happen when you blend the film industry and the music industry together in a very, very arty, kind of cool way with professionals involved all along the path."
Yeah, that's a self-fellating load of crap, and those kinds of descriptions are usually used for overproduced, self-important mediocrity.Thankfully, the album is better than that. A little bit, anyway.
After a two and a half minute instrumental intro that sounds like U2's The Edge orbiting the moon, Love kicks into gear with "Flight of The Apollo," a powerful dose of "you can get through this" with slight Box Car Racer influences and symphonic synths battling for airtime with the sounds of spaceships taking off.
"Young London" begins with a rising, envigorating sound that would be so much better if Tom screamed "THUNDAASTRUUUUCK!" where it was due. The intro is awesome, but the AC/DC ripoff is loud and clear. Unfortunately, the song stalls in second gear and never goes anywhere. The best part of the song is the final minute or so, where the drums play a steady beat and the guitar chimes around with harmonics and echoes.
Largely, that's the problem with the entire album. The guys seem to have gotten very excited about some riffs and the new spaceship sounds bank they found in ProTools, and built an album around a higher concept (love, of course) that everyone could universally relate to. An overdose of interludes and lengthy, melodramatic intros will keep most of this off the radio stations, but I suppose there's something to be said for the fact that the album was made entirely independently.
Shove is a solid example of AVA's attempts to break from their own formula, as single-worthy as Hallucinations, which is possibly the best song on the album. Mark Hoppus' remix of the track, available with a donation to the band, is a noisy abomination that just makes no sense. "The Moon-Atomic (Fragments and Fictions)" is another strong contender, DeLonge singing "We are all that we are / So terribly sorry," a sarcastic, anthemic anti-war pop-rock equivalent of Pearl Jam's "Insignificance". There's a distinct Depeche Mode element to the outro, which stands unnecessarily alone but wins the track points in hindsight.
By contrast, "Epic Holiday" is rife with weak, cheesy lyrics and a guitar riff that's pulled directly from "Everything's Magic" from 2007's I-Empire, which would never have existed without U2's guitarist doing it first. And is it me, or is Mr. DeLonge recycling melodies from AVA's previous two records?
If the band had a different singer, perhaps someone who could actually sing with range instead of the exact same inflections from song to song, they would stand a much greater chance of winning fans over organically. But for all their declarations that this is the pinnacle of their work as a band, this is what they want to be remembered for, it could be so much better with a little less effort to capture the dreamy space romance in a bottle and a little more energy put into sound variation. This is not the sound of falling in love, this is the sound of a band doing their best to be your Valentine's Day soundtrack.
Angels & Airwaves certainly aren't going to win many new fans with this album, though an exception might be made for the latter-day Muse/Green Day crossover crowd. It's a good album, but it's far from a masterpiece.
Angels & Airwaves' Love can be streamed on their myspace and downloaded off Fuel.tv now.
CraveOnline's Call: 6 out of 10
