Shinedown - Attention Attention

After garnering attention to their compositional knack for semi-grungy hard rock with their debut and sophomore albums in the mid-2000’s, Shinedown hit their mainstream peak with 2008’s well-rounded and consistently catchy The Sound of Madness, which yielded single after single throughout the year and into the following year, most of which were pretty solid (“Devour”, “Sound of Madness”, “What a Shame”). Since then, the band stumbled with the far less imaginatively written Amaryllis and plummeted into pop-trend sheep-following with Threat to Survival (whose closing track in particular I remember as a needless and shallow attempt at reaching the “indie kids”).

Attention Attention does little, unfortunately, to slow their downward spiral. Just as full of shotgunned radio rock candidates as their previous album, this new one seems to lack the awareness of how transparent its motives are with a supposed overarching concept of overcoming negativity. Granted, Shinedown made themselves into something palatable for rock radio with the style they played and the ability they had to write within its format, but at least last decade they seemed like they were doing it with conviction and drive. This year and in years past, it just seems like fulfilling an obligatory economic potential rather than an artistic one.

As far as highlights go, they are few. The strongest song on the album, “Devil”, seems to set a precedent for a heavier, more aggressive direction that ultimately fizzles out immediately after the song ends. The solo in “Black Soul” is pretty nice, but it doesn’t quite justify the try-hard alternative rock boredom surrounding it.

For its highlights though, comes an unfortunate imbalance of glaringly awful musical stumbles, of which the faux social commentary of the messily RATM-imitating title track is possibly the worst… possibly. Sadly, it’s far from the standout flaw of the album. Crumbling into typicality from its unfitting intro, “Kill Your Conscious” has a simply terribly annoying vocal refrain as it’s chorus making it an utterly unbearable few minutes to sit through on the album. “Pyro” starts off with a promisingly brooding intro and some seemingly real rock attitude in its verses but its chorus makes it sound like a sorry try at a slightly  more upbeat Imagine Dragons song. And then there’s the cheesy inspirational rock ballad “Get Up”. Possibly the worst song on the album, even worse than the title track, it’s so plain musically and lyrically it’s truly baffling to know they let this one pass by multiple people who agreed it belonged on the album. Then again, with the quality of the rest of the album, perhaps it does belong on the album. If the song wasn’t bad enough on its own, the following track, “Special”, tries to reinforce the previous song’s vague “message” from a confusingly contradictory lyrical standpoint.

The rest of the album is padded with boring verse-chorus alt rock filler that often gets too uncomfortably reminiscent of Imagine Dragons, like “Monsters”, “Creatures” (slightly less dull than most of the filler tracks), the weird, possibly Volbeat-copying “The Human Radio”, “Darkside”, and the millennial “woah”-filled failed uplifting anthem, “Brilliant”. The hard rocker, “Evolve”, channels The Sound of Madness, but not all that originally or freshly enough to sound like anything other than a reach for fans who’ve pined for the band to return to that sound and instead blends into the generic 2000’s hard rock haze surrounding it.

Shinedown is certianly in a pickle from the sounds of this album and its two predecessors. With their stylistic comfort zone phasing out of trendiness, the band seems to be following desperately behind, but trying to juggle their old fan base and their struggled attempts to apply their old techniques to an unfitting new trend. Where they can go from here is hard to say, but I can’t see them lasting on the radio much longer. Perhaps it’s time for them to accept the downturn in popularity that comes with mainstream attention, and focus on creating where they can succeed, even if its “dated”.