you do need to whisper
The ego has landed. After weeks, no months, of weird blogs, crazy postings and promises of the Second Coming, Angels and Airwaves have finally landed on Planet Earth. When Tom DeLonge quit Blink 182 and formed his new band, he promised something which would change the world - a band that would literally reinvent the musical wheel. Unless you've been living under a rock you'll have read DeLonge's endless distribes, hyping his new band like there's no tomorrow. Choice quotes from pre-release interviews? "I promise that you will love it. We have spent quite a lot of time planning how to make a new era of rock and roll, and this film and album I think are going to help with that." Not convinced? OK, here's another: "Imagine a record with 6-7 minute long songs, full of anthemic, melody and long intro's, but it sounds totally different....like the next step you would expect."
With more hype than the second series of Lost, you'd expect 'We Don't Need To Whisper' to actually be half-decent. But you'd be wrong. Very wrong. DeLonge's 'masterpiece' is actually a vapid and boring waste of a shiny disc. Never has an album been so much of a letdown. If ripping off U2 and giving each song extended and over-produced introductions is ground-breaking, fresh and new, then AVA have succeeded. In my eyes, it's nothing like the re-birth of Jesus, as promised, whatsoever. If you take strands of the last Blink album, throw in some Box Car Racer, and make it long and incredibly dull, then you'd have a decent idea of what AVA sound like.
If you've already heard the album's first single, 'The Adventure', then you've already heard the album's best song - by quite some way. Indicative of many of the tracks here, the song takes over a minute to build up, featuring a wall of guitars - apparently there are 98 tracks of instrumentation on this album - before running into a catchy verse and chorus. Sadly, it's one of the album's only highlights, and at track five it's the first real moment where you feel the album is worthy of the hype. It takes more than 25 minutes to get to this point, however, and it's a long, long journey through a vacuous and uninspiring set of songs. 'Valkyrie Missle' is a massive disappointment, while 'Do It For Me Now' doesn't really do it for me at all.
'The War' is one of the better songs here and 'Distraction' is ok. But the rest is very, very poor. When I first listened to this I was disappointed. After about four listens it got marginally better but was still a letdown. For all of the hype, my disappointment was probably made all the worse. I think if any other band had come out with this, it would have been slightly better received - but for someone so influential and famous, this is pretty poor stuff. No doubt it will sell by the bucketload and probably be lauded by the critics for being some misguided classic, but for me it's just plain old boring. Tom, you've let us all down.Read full review
