Aside from a slew of wasted lives, a sad but inescapable consequence of the staggeringly high mortality rates that accompany most worthwhile rock’n’roll voyages is the fact that wet-eared young whippersnappers in their early twenties feel emboldened to undertake ambitious, epic statements about love and death. The Used’s In Love And Death, as its title hints, is one such record, an undeniably heartfelt yowl of despair and self-loathing, even if not exactly up there with Lou Reed’s Magic And Loss as the definitive last word on the subject.
Dedicated to the memory of a ‘Kate, 1981-2004’, the lyric sheet for In Love And Death resembles an extended suicide note, with the opening ‘Take It Away’s (‘I must abuse myself... I hate the light... I’m a worm, Kill me, I’m so apathetic’) no more nakedly dispiriting than the rest of the sentiments that permeate throughout.
For all its primal scream power, In Love And Death suffers from a tangible lack of lyrical eloquence: its junkie references are nowhere near as elegant or tragi-romantic as they might have been, generally focusing on addiction’s ugliness and assiduously avoiding anything suggestive of beauty (‘This poison’s my intoxication/I broke the needle off in my skin/Picked the scab and picked the bleeding’). To compound the problem, it’s instrumentally too sloppy and monotonous to truly hypnotise, and slight Holy Bible-era Manics tendencies don’t add enough extremist power to salvage the disc’s generally underwhelming nature, perched as it is on an uneasy fork in the road between punk, metal and arena-rock.
The Used might be the most significant cultural artefact to emerge from Utah since Neil LaBute’s early Woody-Allen-from-Hell masterpieces, but for the time being, they can be ignored at no great loss.