One thing you can’t fault All Time Low for is their work rate. Since forming in 2003 they’ve released an EP, six studio albums, and two live albums. They’ve also toured worldwide, regularly headlining arenas and playing high up the bill at festivals. However, they still find themselves defined by ‘So Wrong It’s Right’, an album that came out ten years ago. In the decade since they’ve found it hard to settle, having signed to Interscope for the huge flop that was ‘Dirty Work’, before heading back to Hopeless Records and then switching to Fueled By Ramen for their latest release ‘Last Young Renegade’.
All Time Low have also found it hard to settle musically over the past few years and it’s no different here. From the sugary sweet title song ‘Last Young Renegade’ to the offensively dull ‘Afterglow’, All Time Low offer up a bland and bloated album where only a shred of pop punk DNA remains. With a title straight out of a 2003 text message, ‘Nice2KnoU’ is thankfully nowhere near as bad as the name suggests. It’s unlikely to be remembered as one of All Time Low’s best songs, but it temporarily shakes the album out of the dull slumber induced by the other nine tracks and makes up for what it lacks in originality with a feeling of energy and fun that is all but absent elsewhere.
Fall Out Boy headed down the road of churning out over-produced pop songs long ago and All Time Low seem hell-bent on following them. ‘Last Young Renegade’ is a messy fusion of current pop music trends with a sprinkling of sugary sweet power chords and a hint of stage-managed rockstar “attitude”. Take ‘Drugs & Candy’ for example. It may have a faux edgy title, but it can’t escape the squeaky clean production and any rawness that it may have had at the writing stage has been firmly erased.
It’s probably unfair to say that All Time Low don’t care anymore but you could scour ‘Last Young Renegade’ for excitement and passion and you’d fail to find any. ‘Life Of The Party’ is the clichéd tale of a rockstar living it up, but it’s been done a thousand times before and lacks credibility. Even a guest appearance by Tegan And Sara on the solid ‘Ground Control’ can’t lift the album beyond mediocre.
You can’t expect a band to stay the same forever as sooner or later the need to experiment musically gets too much. Maybe it’s simply the sound of them growing up but ‘Last Young Renegade’ is an abandonment of pretty much everything that All Time Low built their reputation on, and for some that will be very hard to take.
CHRIS HILSON