Correction: The Airborne Toxic Event was misspelled in the original version of this headline.
The Airborne Toxic Event burst onto the alternative music scene in 2008 with its eponymous debut album, which featured the oft-played “Sometime Around Midnight.” That album was outstanding.
The band’s new album, “All at Once,” is almost flawless and easily ranks among the top five albums of the year thus far.
These past three years have seen The Airborne Toxic Event mature immensely in terms of both music and lyrics.
Whereas the band’s debut album was primarily an electric guitar, drums and bass album (with the occasional cameo by strings and piano), “All at Once” includes a wide and balanced variety of instrumentation from song to song, including the standard electric guitars and drums but also using more piano, strings and acoustic guitars.
Armed with this bolstered instrumental repertoire, The Airborne Toxic Event has crafted 11 excellently layered songs with an immense wealth of melodic elements that keep the listener guessing without becoming chaotic ““ an extremely difficult thing to do.
The band mixes straight rock songs with acoustic ballads and even some songs that incorporate both elements.
In addition to increasing its sheer melodic variety, The Airborne Toxic Event shows even more control over the volume and intensity of its music. This album makes full use of dynamics, moving smoothly and effortlessly between loud, rambunctious sections of tracks and softer, gentler sections.
The music itself is not, however, what sets this album apart and transforms it into the achievement that it is. It’s the lyrics, which amount to nothing less than poetry.
“The Kids Are Ready to Die,” for example, sounds like it is almost an autobiographical coming-of-age story. The song tells of the confusion, anger and frustration of growing up as the carelessness of childhood fades away, an example of which is the line, “The weakness we left behind seems to be getting stronger.”
The songs on the album are about a range of topics, from loss, confusion and frustration to love, growing up and marriage (though “Welcome to Your Wedding Day” is not exactly an endorsement of matrimony).
Three songs in particular stand out as the diamonds among the other jewels on this album: “All for a Woman,” “The Kids Are Ready to Die” and “The Graveyard Near the House.”
“All for a Woman” is a love song that details the feelings of a young man who is hopelessly in love with a woman and all the things he does for the sake of that love. The song prominently features nimbly plucked acoustic guitar offset by sparse drums and a bit of piano and is also one of the first of several songs on the album with outstanding male and female vocal harmonies.
The theme of the song itself isn’t overly original, but the lyrics are. The song captures perfectly the feeling of being very small, of being almost intimidated by the presence of the person you love: “And you’re shivering cold like you’re just 10 years old. … The light from inside her filling up the darkness in your head.”
The most powerful song on the entire album, however, is “The Graveyard Near the House,” a ballad driven mainly by acoustic guitar with support from strings and piano.
It is the story of one man’s anxiety about whether people’s relationships are genuine: “And it left me to wonder if people ever know each other / Or just stumble around like strangers in the dark.”
Even more poignant, however, is the song’s take on the love of one couple as the man and woman grow older. Near the end of the song, the woman asks the man if he will continue to love her, even as she grows old.
The man sings to his beloved, “I could list each crippling fear like I’m reading from a will / And I’ll defy every one and love you still.”
The Airborne Toxic Event’s debut album was a great alternative rock album. “All at Once” holds even more power and raw emotion with an even more varied musical base.