Happiness is Taking Back Sunday

You remember your first high school crush, yes? Who doesn’t recall that queasy over-the-falls feeling that percolated in the back of your head like some form of madness? Well, as a band, that’s where Taking Back Sunday lives. From Long Island, they’ve been around now for 15 years. At first a power-pop band with punk leanings, Taking Back Sunday went mainstream with a song that radio programmers pile-drove into our collective subconscious called “Make Damn Sure,” as in “I’m gonna make sure you can’t ever leave/ No, you won’t ever get too far from me.” They’ve since bolstered their soundtrack for teen angst into a tight, melody-driven post-hardcore unit with a frontman who looks eerily like the late Michael Hutchence of INXS. Taking Back Sunday are old hands at crafting pop hooks into their songs, rather than crafting songs from a string of pop hooks like Incubus or Linkin Park or even the on-again off-again Blink-182.

A word about post-hardcore: it’s a branch of hardcore punk, which itself was an outgrowth of punk. Post-hardcore is not post-punk. It sounds instead like a controlled explosion of guitars with pretty vocals. Saccharine Trust created the sound that bands like Fugazi later took to the bank. The early ’90s saw San Diego at the epicenter of post-hardcore with the emergence of quirky pre-screamo bands such as Drive Like Jehu, Three Mile Pilot, Black Heart Procession, and, of course, the Locust. There’s a whole new order of bands that have likewise formed and split apart from that hometown sound, including Pierce the Veil, a global touring act that home bases in Mission Bay.

As for Taking Back Sunday? I think they’ll go the distance. I can see them on the cover of an issue of AARP someday. In the meantime, look for their latest full-length, Happiness Is, scheduled for a March 18 release.