Album Review: The Warning - "Keep Me Fed"

It’s hard to imagine the pressure of being an artist trying to follow up on a breakthrough.  One pictures a dim room, band members sitting under a single bare light bulb, saying to each other “Okay, we made a statement.  What do we do now to follow up?” Fans are rarely content – we are conditioned to believe that the apex could always be ahead.  The central thesis of the soft science of marketing impresses upon us that what’s next is always better than what we have.  

That’s probably an over-dramatization, but that’s the moment The Warning finds themselves in.  They began to turn heads with “Queen of the Murder Scene” two albums back, but that was ripples in a cow pond relative to the floodgates of “Error.”  Suddenly the band was a hot commodity – sold out shows across the country, appearances on whatever remains of the corpse of MTV, attention from major publications, all of it.

Under that weight, how would the band respond?

The short answer is, with measured but confident evolutionary strides, folding more and more influences into the music of their new album “Keep Me Fed,” and sounding contemporary while still incorporating all the rock and roll standbys that helped the band come to prominence in the first place.

First notable moment first – at the end of “Error” was “Martardio,” the album’s only song in the band’s native Spanish.  Overlooked among all the bombastic singles, the song was quietly one of the album’s best songs.  For “Keep Me Fed,” the band plays “Que Mas Quieres,” and drops into the clean up spot on the record (that’s the fourth song, for non-baseball fans,) front and center in the record where it can’t be missed.  Again, it’s one of the stronger songs on the album, this time in the place it deserves.

From this point forward is where the album starts to unfold in new directions.  “MORE” channels a touch of the guitar thump and dire tones of contemporaries Dead Poet Society, and “Escapism” is a bouncy, funky little tune that hits right with a singalong chorus, but then pounds a crusher of a breakdown at the end.  

As the album goes along, there are hallmarks of other familiar names that shade across the speakers, notably the double set of “Hell You Call A Dream” and “Consume,” which calls to mind two different phases of Lacuna Coil’s career.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves – this is still The Warning.  It would have been easy for the band to double down into their laurels and make “Error” again, or worse yet, stumble backward into a rock and roll album about partying and public drunkenness.  This power trio refuses to do that, instead writing a pained anthem like “Satisfied,” which maintains accessibility and a choral vocal, while speaking candidly about pain and relationships.  This kind of songwriting, coupled with the obvious talent of the three players (and making the correct choices in songwriters to collaborate with,) is makes The Warning stand out from any number of also-ran rock bands in the last twenty years who crashed upon the shore, but receded meekly back into the ocean.

It's been a long time since a band this young caused this level of excitement in the rock and roll scene.  “Keep Me Fed” well, keeps the audience fed by showing new sides of a familiar band.