BILLY TALENT: 'Billy Talent III' (Atlantic)
Popular belief has it that bands need time to mature; that it takes around three or four albums before they truly hit pay dirt. Occasionally, however, a band pops out of the creative womb with a sound so completely polished, and so utterly their own, that the concept of progress is rendered redundant – if the music’s already this good, why change?
Billy Talent are one of these rare commodities. With their stupendous debut album, Canada’s finest stamped their splenetic seal on contemporary punk rock, with Ben Kowalewicz’s agitated vocals and Ian D’Sa’s scattershot riffs providing a match made in auditory heaven. It’s a format that proved massively successful and thankfully, it largely dominates this, their third record in six years. The musical marriage is still going strong, creating a series of fantastically intense tracks that worm their way into your head with the greatest of ease. The highlights are the most venomous moments, such as the ridiculously catchy ‘Sweet Veronica’ and the invective ‘Pocketful of Dreams’, where Ben’s vocals spit aggression, while the whirlwind of calamitous guitars provide the most delectable soundtrack. And then there’s ‘Turn Your Back’, a song in such a rage that it threatens to burst out of your speakers and bash your brains in.
Unusually, however, there are a number of pedestrian moments too. Instead of opening with the energetic sprint of a ‘This Is How It Goes’ or a ‘Devil in a Midnight Mass’, the album crawls out of the gates with the crushingly repetitive ‘Devil on my Shoulder’, and then continues with the disappointing trudge of comeback single ‘Rusted by the Rain’. And when momentum does build, there are several lumbering, proggy numbers waiting in the wings to kill it; ‘White Sparrows’ takes a great big dump all over the fire and fury created by the excellent ‘Tears Into Wine’, while the one chord monotony of ‘Sudden Movements’ is so far removed from the unquestionable genius of ‘Turn Your Back’ that it’s almost painful.
For the most part, ‘Billy Talent III’ sticks to the band’s well-worn formula and this is what proves to be its saving grace. There are just enough powerfully visceral slabs of belligerent punk rock to forgive its occasional flirtations with the monochrome, but sadly, not enough to make this as stunning and thrilling an effort as ‘I’ or ‘II’. Solid by anyone else’s standards, but maybe just a little disappointing by Billy Talent’s. (6/10)
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