Send "The Airborne Toxic Event " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Popmatters |
 Like the man who wrote the novel that inspired their name, the Airborne Toxic Event can seem unforgivably pretentious to some and profoundly poetic to others. Also like Don DeLillo, singer/lyricist Mikel Jollett and his bandmates definitely consider themselves to be enlightened guardians of a steely-eyed emotional truth of the life-altering kind. For them, there is no repression, compromise, or disguise. Unswerving directness rules the day, every day; it is their natural language.This tendency towards confessional earnestness in the band’s lyrics and ponderous dimensions in their music can be a weakness just as surely as it can be a strength. For all of his literary bona fides (he was a widely-published freelancer before forming the band), Jollett has a Bono-like affinity for attempting to shoehorn the entire collective traumatic energy of the human race into every skyward-reaching rock anthem. When this approach works (as it did on “Innocence”, the mood-swinging finale of the band’s self-titled debut), the results can be thrilling. But the risk is great, and the consequences of failure dire, the slightest miscalculation can lead to bloated, overwrought, and generalist nonsense. For the Airborne Toxic Event’s first record, Jollett drew heavily from a quick succession of personal distresses: his mother’s cancer, an autoimmune disease of his own, a painful break-up. From Rumours to In Utero to Funeral, great rock records have often been born of such suffering and the existential qualms that result from it. If The Airborne Toxic Event was not even close to being a great record, it was at least a fascinating one, torn between elegantly-worded expressions of loathing and bad poetry of the disproportionately emotional sort. Indeed, the album’s greatest success, “Sometime Around Midnight”, combined the two in irresistible ways: vivid, hyper-real details dropping away into stumbling, articulate angst directed at the very pillars of human consciousness. It had much of the inebriated existential mystification of early Kafka, even if you sometimes wanted to shake the lyrical narrator silly and tell him to just forget the girl and move on....full text |
| Nme |
| Well then. The Airborne Toxic Event's new album, 'All At Once', might not have been our lead album review last week (that accolade went to the mighty Tune-Yards and her 8/10-scoring second album, 'w h o k i l l', but it certainly generated the most online opprobrium amongst the band's fans, quick to leap to defend their idols in comment sections the internet over. Our own Jazz Monroe attracted a fair about of stick on Twitter for his 3/10 indictment of the LA five-piece's second album. He wins the nascent Award For The Most Unpleasant And Graphic Imagery In A Review for this line in particular: "Singer Mikel groans and splutters like a man performing something my – ahem – mate’s last girlfriend dubbed ‘thirsty dog cunnilingus’." Thanks a bunch for that, Jazz. He goes on to call 'Numb' "indie-rock stadium-baiting so deeply uninspiring you would need to send a SWAT team down to Ineptitude just to drag it within sniping range of Decent Music." So err, that's a no then, Jazz. Watch your inbox - TATE are no strangers to writing sniffy open letters to writers of reviews they disagree with......full text |
| Music |
| Orchestral rock outfit The Airborne Toxic Event head to the majors for their sophomore album, trading indie label Majordomo for Island Records and hiring Dave Sardy (Oasis, Band Of Horses) to handle production. The result is an album that holds tight to their poetic lyrics, but rolls them into towering, catchy hooks and a more ambitious musical direction. If there is an issue with the album's more adventurous direction, they have the tendency to wear their influences on their sleeve at times. Nimble riffs anxiously needle out of the speakers on the bouncy, Talking Heads leaning "Changing", and the doe-eyed bliss of "Strange Girl" gleefully recalls The Cure's more love-struck moments. The the strummed folk tune "The Kids Are Ready To Die" channels the band's inner Springsteen, with the slowly burning passion in, front man, Mikel Jollett's vocals rising with the story. It would be a serious problem a lesser band, but even as Jollett does his best Neil Diamond impression over flickering Edge-inspired riffs on "All At Once", they never lose their unique sonic personality. The narrative storytelling lyrics are so literary and gorgeously constructed that it is nearly impossible to pull out a few lines as an example of their greatness. A handful of lines from the morbid acoustic folk of "The Graveyard Near The House" would not begin to capture the lovely romantic sentiment in the eerily sweet song. String laced power ballad "All For A Woman" is a romantic treat, "And you're shivering cold like you're just ten years old / And she's lying asleep in your bed / And you're standing beside her / The light from inside her, filling the darkness in your head". Fans may be checking their iPod at the start of "Half Of Something Else", as the song bears a strong resemblance to their breakout hit "Somewhere Around Midnight"; with Jollett opening the song with the same hushed vocal phrasing. The song, about finding the missing part in your life, eventually roars to life to blaze its own path....full text |
The Airborne Toxic Event lyrics
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