The Used
Heartwork

The trajectory drawn by The Used's career encapsulates all the characteristic elements of something that could have been but was not. A dizzying debut with a self-titled album among the best alt-rock releases of 2002, a handful of releases good at flirting with the mainstream, and the consequent decent level of popularity achieved thanks to singles placed in the soundtracks of "Saw II" and "Transformers."

Then, something in the mechanisms that ensured the band's delicate internal balance broke down. The shadows stopped being merely a stylistic device, intertwining in a dance among themselves, suddenly becoming a vortex that chewed up, stripped down, and spat out the members, leaving them at the edge of the avenue of unkept promises. Only God knows how the former emocore prodigy boys emerged bruised but ultimately unscathed from addictions and a series of lineup changes as rapid as they were decidedly dysfunctional to the physiological, inevitable, and always critical phase of breaking away from certain legacies that, depending on the conduct, have said a lot and in some cases have represented a scythe on the continuation of activities for formations of the same mold.

In this case, it took patience until "The Canyon" (2017, Hopeless Records) to listen to something noteworthy again from Bert McCracken and company, and it's in the sign of this renewed confidence that I approach "Heartwork." After all, the elements for building more than respectable expectations are all there: "Blow Me Away" is the single that precedes the album, a 3:22 compendium of the glittering past, of never entirely forgotten influences among the band's musical references, and of steps forward toward a change of direction; a solid rhythm section, a wall of guitars through which the schizophrenic incursions of newcomer Joey Bradford (formerly of Thrice and Atreyu) make their way, simple yet effective vocal lines constitute the welcome appropriate to guest Jason Butler, on whose entrance a breakdown of 'deftonesian' memory is laid.

The return of historic producer John Feldmann in the director’s chair, two albums apart from the last collaboration, the debut on Big Noise (founded by Feldmann himself, also A&R), and a series of collaborations that cannot help but produce excitement, complete the aforementioned set of elements.

And yet, once again, consistent with the recent releases onto which I've poured every hope, I feel taken as a fool. Worse, because The Used put on the table everything I expected not to hear from them anymore, but proposed in the most intelligent, refined, genuinely provocative way ever experienced before. Take "1984(infinite jest)," for example: the pronounced melodic sensitivity that made the band's fortune merges with hardcore echoes, escalating just when one expects it to explode in the most savage of refrains, instead plunges into almost industrial metal underworlds, through whose penumbra the whispered verse 'ignorance is this' resonates pure dissonance within dissonance.

Perspectives are turned upside down, "Gravity's Rainbow" is not latent image but its negative, and everything that could sound familiar, both in good and absolutely bad, this time takes center stage and leaves the edges to their appropriate role: the margin. There is only one reassuring constant that "Heartwork" shares with all other The Used works, and it's Jeph Howard's groove. He enjoys himself, the only survivor of the original formation alongside McCracken, taking the synth to 'shuffle-ate' until making it less than a supporting actor in the danceable "Clean Cut Heals."

They aren't just sounds; they are contents, the intrinsic connection of Bert with his own art has remained unchanged. Even if he isn't wandering within the sordid belly of his psyche with the same intensity as before, the spoken words of the track naming the album is a fairly faithful projection of what life in Orem must have been like for a kid dealing with Mormon doctrine and pressures to maintain the status quo. Elsewhere, other autobiographical references, shared with the second guest (Caleb Shomo from Beartooth): "The Lottery" is the manifesto of The Used's primordial poetics, taking its name and inspiration in the text's writing from Shirley Jackson's story about an imaginary town characterized by an annual bizarre tradition of selecting a random resident to stone to death, as if to represent the breaking of the umbilical cord, the mutual repudiation between the frontman and the same Utah community.

The bulky ghost of the first two albums hovers, and it could not be any different; the few shadows leave the opposing polarities of The Used's sound uncovered, the more pop sensitivity and the hardcore root of the combo. It bounces from the sounds of "BIG, WANNA BE" brought to hit parade by recent Tom Walker to moments more easily placed at any point in their discography like "Obvious Blasé," within which Travis Barker's percussion contribution goes culpably unnoticed. Even, as has happened in the past with songs like "The Bird And The Worm" and "Wake The Dead," the influences of the famous Danny Elfman add theatricality to the interpretation of the frequent recurring literary references in the lyrics, always the real plus of having a songwriter like McCracken in the lineup.

If there is one merit that should be credited to them, it's managing to systematically thwart any attempt at categorization while handling a decidedly wide range of musical genres. At a certain point, however, and this album is emblematic in this sense, one realizes that this innate creative maturity, combined with the frantic experimental demand, regularly creates confused expectations in the key passages of the tracklist. Thus unpredictability becomes a loss of orientation, and only a number of repeats that cannot help but stem from patience and attentive predisposition allows one to frame "Heartwork" with a slightly more exhaustive overall view.

The glass is still half full; the ardor of the early days has returned to vibrate in the songs while The Used gaze upon the abyss left behind, flaunting inspiration from all musical genres without the slightest prejudice. It's the half-empty part of the glass, if anything, that seriously concerns. What's the point of being a band composed of guitar, bass, and drums if half of the tracks of an album are played? What purpose can there be in continuing to release music that cannot bring a composing approach so intimate and personal on stage live? To what extent is it legitimate to entrust entire songs to the synth and EDM canons? Perhaps it will be The Used themselves who will dissolve the resistances to this so annoying trend. Maybe...