Taking Back Sunday revamps style and sound

Taking Back Sunday

With the All-American Rejects

St. Vincent College

Friday Nov. 13

8… Taking Back Sunday

With the All-American Rejects

St. Vincent College

Friday Nov. 13

8 p.m.

Veteran Brooklyn rock band Taking Back Sunday is back with a new album, a new guitarist and a new outlook on its music.

Taking Back Sunday’s Matt Rubano, who plays bass and lends his vocals to the band, explained how his band’s music has evolved since the release of its last album and how the most recent lineup change has affected its music.

“With each record we’ve done, we have wanted to take a step forward and have always wanted to grow and develop the sound of the band. On ‘New Again,’ it was really important for us to really feel like we were redefining what it means to sound like Taking Back Sunday,” Rubano said.

The departure of lead guitarist and backup vocalist Fred Mascherino led to Matt Fazzi joining the band as Mascherino’s replacement, also pushing the group to reinvent itself.

“Matt Fazzi joined the band and brought with him a very open-minded and fearless kind of approach to writing music.

“That sort of spread to everyone else, and we were all vibing off of [the approach] in the rehearsal space,” he said.

Rubano claimed that there isn’t mProxy-Connection: keep-alive

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h you can do to prepare in the event of members rotating in and out of the band except hope that the new members will fit organically into the band and take its music to a new level.

“It’s not the kind of thing you prepare for or anticipate, and you just deal with it the same way you do when your boyfriend breaks up with you out of the blue. You just kind of go, ‘Oh well, that didn’t work,’ and you keep going,” he said.

Rubano said that the symbolism for the title of Taking Back Sunday’s fourth studio album, New Again, is both personal and musical.

“We were enjoying what we were doing. We just used our raw instincts to move forward, and as a result it was a really fun record to make, and it felt like we had a little bit of an energy rebirth while we were working on it.”

One of the deciding factors that distinguished New Again from the band’s prior records was its source of inspiration.

“On New Again in particular, songs really came from every way imaginable, and some of the seeds for what these songs became were planted years ago. Some [were inspired] while jamming in the back of the bus,” he said.

The three-year gap since the band’s last album, Louder Now, allowed the band to come into its own and gave it the opportunity to focus on the music it were inspired to make rather than feeling the pressure to rise to other people’s expectations.

“All of the influences and opinions and little tiny voices — if you really know what you’re doing, they don’t mean anything because most of those opinions aren’t weighted in anything that matters to music. Most of those opinions are business-related,” Rubano said.

The bassist explained that two of the three years in between Louder Now and New Again were spent touring.

The last year was spent working on the new album and making sure it was something the band would be both proud of and excited to release to its fans.

“Ultimately we just really always want to make sure what we are putting out is up to our own standard of being good enough to call it Taking Back Sunday. We put out a record when we have the music that we think is worth working on,” he said.

Taking Back Sunday will play with The All-American Rejects and Anberlin at 8 p.m. on Friday Nov. 13 at St. Vincent College, in Latrobe, Pa.