The Used Launches a Defiant Cry For The Romantically Disenchanted

Dry your wearied eyes, blog buds. Orem, Utah's greatest and quite likely only ass thrashing rock band The Used have resurfaced. Ever since "The Bird and The Worm" creeped into my faint heart these guys have mastered the art of both keeping and maintaining my attention. First up from the soon to be (possibly?) part of your music library "Imaginary Enemy", is "Cry". The title shouldn't have you thinking "Perfect. Yet another pathetic open wound whine-a-thon revolving around some guy's crushed heartstrings." The intensity The Used carries around their necks as a badge of honor has lost no luster. "The Bird and The Worm" was a fun, if not white knuckle promoting song because it gave you a really firm idea of how off his rocker singer Bert McCracken truly was. The chorus and subsequent refrains could yank the hairs to an upright position on the back of your neck simply because you didn't know when Bert's madness would subside. All you had going in your favor was the assurance that yes, Bert would at some point run out of gas. The strings brought shivers. The keyboards dimmed the comfort level you had in your own skin. When he wasn't screeching his helpless travails, he was vainly trying to keep some lid on his thinly veiled nuttiness. On "Cry" Bert learns how to keep time with his fury. "Cry" makes you run like gangbusters to catch up. You're fully grasping that Bert's mad at his woman and wants her to bleed a little bit before attempting to wriggle back into his heart. For gosh sakes, in the later stages of the song he insists the girl's going to have to ask him nicer than that. Love is a ticking time bomb she's better know how to diffuse or pieces of her heart will be strewn everywhere. "The Bird and The Worm" wasn't urgent. Unsettling is more like it. "Cry", on the other hand, moves at too much of s breakneck pace to have the time to unsettle anyone's body or soul. Life in this fast lane works to the band's advantage. They've traded in parlor games for unrelenting power punches. Drummer Dan Whitesides lets rip blow after uncomprising blow. You'd think it was his girlfriend that was screwing him over. Instead he takes Bert's jagged barbed wire denouncements and spins them into percussive mastery which definitively lets the record show if you play games with a man's heartstrings you'll have to deal with the fallout at the other end. Bert doesn't nibble with his keyboard chord sequences... steadily he tears away at his woman's self-assuredness, real or imagined. Jeph Howard maintains a spirited bass pace. He knows The Used are above and beyond the sum of their parts. The bridge is where Bert maximizes the escalating dramatic effect of his fractured love. Quinn Allman winds up and down the fret of his guitar frantically. His role in "Cry" is one of oxygen supplier to Bert's wild man contention that: "Love is not a battle, it's a ticking time bomb." Being the nervous system specific listener that I am I've got to tell you Bert's more menacing when his snarlingly whispering that belief rather than testing the outer bounds of his vocal range. Bert's cooking up one menacing quiet storm. If you've glanced at a news headline lately you know it's the supposedly quiet ones that could be hiding past cosmic hurts that unleash themselves on an unsuspecting public to change the contexts of communities great and small. The Used sustain their united front magnificently. Since the lady made Bert cry, she's going to have beg for a place in his good graces. Subtlety gets hurled out the window, and the results ricochet of every quadrant of your brain. File this under short, sweet, and satisfying. Say it, wrap it up, and leave others to sweep up the wreckage. In rock circles that formula equals reliable success. No Kleenex needed here. The Used are miles away from victim status.