In the beginning there were emo pioneers Lifetime. Then the world heard Saves The Day's unfeasibly high-pitched tones, Thursday's intense guitar barrages, and Senses Fail's sonic heartbreak. As New Jersey's latest breakthrough hopes, Tokyo Rose have a lot to live up to.
The quartet fits in with the ethos of the Jersey scene, where community, DIY promotion and heartfelt lyrics are essential parts of making music. Tokyo Rose are essentially a self-made boy band with some well-placed guitars - perfect for sunny days at The Warped Tour. But as the sepia forest on their artwork suggests, their songs are also sentimental and tinged with gothic isolation, in line with the aesthetic vogue of rising nu-punk stars such as Fall Out Boy and Panic At The Disco.
In such an overcrowded, wide-ranging genre, it's hard to make a mark. Tokyo Rose flirt with cultural politics on title track New American Saint, which uses reality TV to highlight the sadness of self-image anxieties, but the album as a whole defaults to the well-worn concern of romantic relationships. The pre break-up anxiety of Goodbye Almond Eyes leaks into the funereal organ drones of The Tin Man Gets His Heart, which in turn ushers in a remainder of drowning metaphors, deep breathing and apocalyptic violence.
New American Saint is a smoothly produced disk of thorny love songs with huge lighter-waving potential, stop-start moments and simple melodies. It's dark, confessional and it'll make sensitive members of the emo-fringed brigade feel at one with creation. But it'll bore non-scenesters to death.
--Eleanor Goodman
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