The basic thing that I want you to take away from this article is this: this album rocks. Plain and simple, this is a rocking album. If you like to rock, if you enjoy rock music at all, you should go out and buy this CD. Download it from iTunes. It is well worth the 9.99 as there is not a bad song on it.
That out of the way, I can get down to specifics. Billy Talent III is the third and most recent of Billy Talent’s albums. It is the follow up to Billy Talent II, which in turn, came after their self-titled debut. Billy Talent, as a band, is not very creative with the names to their albums. I would predict that their fourth album will be called Billy Talent IV. But the name of the album is not really important; what’s important is the songs on the album.
I would, at best, describe myself as a moderate fan of Billy Talent. I own their first two albums, and like both of them. Billy Talent III is a bit of a departure for the group. There is a bit less of lead singer Ben Kowalewicz’s screaming vocals (which is to say, there are the same amount of vocals, but fewer of those vocals are screamed), and the guitar riffs tend to be a bit slower and have a bit more of an almost classic rock feel to them. But the overall feeling of the songs is still consistent with the rest of the band’s work. It still feels like Billy Talent, simply a calmer, more mature version on Billy Talent.
Some bands, when they calm down and mature, become crappy, for lack of a better term. I would present the example of Linkin Park, a band that started off distinctly immature, screaming ‘shut up’ at a non-specified ‘you’. Linkin Park was fun to listen to precisely because they were immature. In their later albums, they matured and calmed down and, I think, their music has suffered because of it. A similar example is the band Our Lady Peace. If you listen to Naveed, their first album, they are raw, unpolished and good. They hit their peak with their second album, Clumsy, before beginning a downward spiral into commercial pop-rock. They have now calmed and matured themselves away from being anything resembling Our Lady Peace.
But unlike Our Lady Peace or Linkin Park, who matured themselves into mediocrity, Billy Talent has changed only for the better, while still remaining true to themselves. Their songs still have their characteristic darkness and the lyricist has kept the tendency to write about heavier subject matter. Previous Billy Talent songs have been about a bullied child committing suicide and a child being molested by a priest. On this album, we have songs about a lover dying in a hospital, (White Sparrows, probably the best song on the album) an attempted suicide (Saint Veronika) and the global problems of poverty, war and the environment (Turn Your Back). But they never allow the message of their lyrics overpower the simple fun of their music. As I said earlier, the album rocks. Billy Talent remains one of the few bands that can pull off a successful bass solo.
The high points of the album are the first song: Devil on My Shoulder, a song that starts the album off strong. The first track makes a promise that the rest of the album delivers on. The aforementioned White Sparrows is lyrically powerful and the radio friendly Turn Your Back is just plain fun. If there is a low point, it is the song Sudden Movements; it simply lacks the energy of the other tracks.
The whole album is excellent and it is definitely worth checking out. It is a worthy successor to their previous two efforts.
