James Arden checks out the garage rockers latest album.
The Christian rock band from Brighton bring religion to the masses.
Recipe for modern R'n'B album: liberal helpings of guest rappers and an overdose of sexual euphemisms.
In Angels and Airwaves sophomore release, they produce another mellow, ambience based rock album. I-Empire aims to be the second half of the story that Tom Delonge began with his first release with AVA, We Don’t Need To Whisper.
Delonge makes rather ambitious, and pretentious, claims about the content with his albums lyrics, in that they are exploring the potential of all human experience, the personal “empire” that we create within all of us, and the rebirth that one goes through in life.
An incredible concept, however, the lyrics reflect the same idea as most alternative rock albums by former pop-punk stars who vented about their teenage problems. Delonge’s lamenting about family problems, society, and the so-called human experience appear as a noble attempt to try and gather a number of listeners to change things with him.
If the underlying political theme wasn’t given away by the blunt title of the album, then you will see it within the first few tracks. Although, most people will not realise when one track finishes and the next one starts, as this albums sound is very similar throughout. As a matter of fact, Delonge was correct in saying that he wished to finish the story in this album as these twelve tracks sound exactly like the previous album.
AVA creates a good amount of new tracks and even brings in Delonge’s past style of the emotive punk ballad with an interesting twist.
Some bands like to sample lyrics and riffs from previous songs as a call back, but this technique is overdone here. So much so that whole songs seem to be used with new lyrics and slight key changes and modifications. In some ways this is clever, but not the type of clever that will convert listeners. They want to hear new songs by the band they like listening to. That is where Angel and Airwaves falls short.
AVA creates a good amount of new tracks and even brings in Delonge’s past style of the emotive punk ballad with an interesting twist, but the tracks ambient solo-ing and sustained keyboard chords do not keep the listener interested through the whole album. Most of the songs have a very strong musical grounding and moderate lyrical writing but this grounding weakens with one minute of solos and around thirty seconds of stellar white noise at the start and end of each track.
The end result of these tracks is a so-so album that ultimately fails to achieve its potential, mainly because of the hype created by Delonge. The amount of self-promotion in these tracks borders very closely on annoyance. All in all, Delonge still has the chip on his shoulder from his Blink days and still looks to prove himself as a legitimate artist within the rock world, but sadly tries a little to hard to do so.
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