Review: Nothing Personal – All Time Low
Rating: 3/5
Pop punk has always been about writing songs that include the essence of summer, skating, girlfriends and getting dumped, drunk and doing whatever you want, with the sounds of loud, fast, distorted guitars and crappy singing. At the same time these songs have to have incredibly catchy hooks, poppy melodies and guitar riffs that could get stuck in your head for days on end.
It is getting this formula of combining the pop and the punk elements correctly to various degrees which separates the crappy boy band albums from the great pop-punk albums. (see Green Day’s Dookie, Blink 182’s Cheshire Cat, Fall Out Boy’s Evening Out With Your Girlfriend etc…)
Starting of with an indie release album The Party Scene, All Time Low ticked all the right boxes of what defines pop punk with songs such as, The Girl’s a Straight-Up Hustler, Break Out! Break Out! and Circles. The band then signed with Hopeless Records where they picked the favorites from their debut album and rerecorded them. Creating the much more polished and professional sounding EP Put Up Or Shut Up, this eventually lead them to record their second album So Wrong It’s Right.
But before I get carried away writing a biography of the band I better get started on the review. So here I go…
Nothing Personal is All Time Low’s third and latest album, and evident from their sound that they have changed alot since their first release. Moving on from the heavier punkier Put Up Or Shut Up sound, the band has changed its direction to a much poppier sound continuing on from the direction of So Wrong Its Right. Whether this is good or bad thing relies on how they have balanced their poppy-ness with thier punky-ness.
The album starts off with Weightless, and if you are an avid All Time Low fan, the first time you listen to Weightless you will immediately notice that Alex Gaskarth’s (singer/guitarist) vocals are unusually high and this may put you off but don’t fret because as soon as the distorted guitars start, the song explodes into an incredibly catchy chorus making Weightless the best song on the album.
Break Your Little Heart continues the great pop punk sounds with the angst filled lyrics featuring the title of the album “Wide awake my mistakes so predictable, You were fake I was great – nothing personal” (I love it when bands do that) But it is after this track that I start to find faults in the album, and the first fault lies with Damned If I Do Ya (Damned If I Don’t).
Nothing Personal was Produced by five different producers and the reason the band has chosen to do this was because they felt that the songs on their previous album sounded too similar with the same feel for each song. But having five different producers to produce their different sounds could also have its faults and to me this is evident in the songs Damned If I Do Ya (Damned If I Don’t) and Too Much.
Damned If I Do Ya (Damned If I Don’t) was produced by Butch Walker and it is SOOO evident that he has had alot of input into the song which isn’t really a bad thing apart from being a bit too poppy for my liking. It is Too Much which REALLY drops the ball on this album. The song was produced by The-Dream and personally I don’t know what they were thinking… this song sounds like something off a NSYNC or Back Street Boys album… this weird sound is also found on the intro to Walls but as soon as Alex starts singing, the song becomes great and defiantly one of my favourites all you have to do is remind yourself that they probably wont be able to play that into when they play it live.
Another disappointment is Hello Broklyn, the song just doesn’t sit well with me, especially the lyrics at the end where he starts naming all the different cities… (London, Tokyo, Boston, Frisco, DC, Chicago, Baltimore, there’s a party at the end of the world, Toronto, Memphis, Rio, Dublin, Mexico, Paris, here we go everybody knows there’s a party at the end of the world) its just TOO cheesy and poppy.
The album continues with again, the poppier tunes, of Lost in Stereo and Sick Little Games which I find disappointing compared to what they could really sound like. However hidden within these pop filled tracks lies a gem and this gem goes by the name of Stella. Stella is a change from the “normal” All Time Low sound and reminds me slightly of My Chemical Romance, not the old MCR but more of a Teenagers from Black Parade (that might just be me, but yeah I really enjoy listening to Stella)
On a similar note, the chorus on Keep the Change, You Filthy Animal sounds like a song of a New Found Glory Album (Listen To Your Friends) but who cares? The song sounds great! It is defiantly going to become a great song live along with A Party Song (The Walk of Shame) which is filled to the brim with gang vocals for the crowed to sing along to (lots and lots of Woah-Oh’s) both of these songs are poppy but still retaining the All Time Low feel putting them up high on my play count.
The album ends with Therapy which is what I assume to be the ballad or slow song of the album. After Remembering Sunday on the previous album they had alot to live up to and Therapy just doesn’t do it. It reminds me of this. Actually maybe it would have been better if they recorded that for the album.
Overall the album has some great songs such as Weightless, Break Your Little Heart, Stella, Keep the Change and A Party Song however I feel it doesn’t really live up to their Put Up Or Shut Up standard which is what made me fall in LOVE with this band in the first place. Kinda disappointing but not that bad – Nothing Personal.
Check out Adrian’s review here.
- review writer timothy
