Three Days Grace - Outsider


I went into this post-Adam era Three Days Grace album expecting a continuation of the band’s struggle to capture the same vibrancy they had on their relatively classic 2000’s material, and for the most that’s pretty much what I got here.
From the non-descript Chester Bennington impersonating to try to match Adam Gontier’s natural gruffness, to the typical 2000’s alt-rock/alt-metal vagueness of the lyrics, this is Three Days Grace re-digesting the same material they put out on One-X and their debut, with a massive fraction of potency lost with every pass through their musical gastrointestinal tract. Nowhere else does the album give such a perfectly unflattering example of its sonic staleness and contrived lyricism than on the title track. It’s basic, passionless delivery of the unbelievably unpoetic lyrics is honestly astonishing. This whole album is such an easily ignorable blur but the straightforwardness of the lyrics on “Outsider” just make me wonder how they ran through it multiple times and decided that was the best it could get, and for a title track too. “The New Real” is another notably failed try at tackling the narcissism catalyzed by social media; the lyrics are so amateurish and surface-level, it’s not going to be doing much to change anyone’s behavior because it’s not adding anything to the conversation, it’s just pointing it out like the band just noticed this negative aspect of Facebook this year. I’ll give the album’s closer, “The Abyss” a bit of credit for being a tier or two above everything that came before it, but that’s still not saying much.
I’ll say, I think Matt Walsh’s vocal chops have improved maybe a little bit since Human, but the obvious difference between the band’s output with him versus when Gontier was at the helm is glaring. With Walsh they sound like such a by-the-numbers, C-list/D-list emo-ish alternative rock band reliant basically entirely on CD sales at Hot Topic. With Gontier, they still weren’t the most unique group in the world and they still sold to the mall scene kid crowd bigtime, but Gontier clearly brought a level of passion to the music that gave them a further reach that they’re just trying to fabricate now and it’s hard to watch. I don’t even know what I would tell them; they’re a band who clearly lost the one member who carried them, and now they’re carrying a name with a history they can probably never live up to, at least not like this. This is completely forgettable, recycled, and dated, and I am never going to listen to it again.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Zeal & Ardor - Stranger Fruit

Image
Even though it had been in on their Bandcamp page since 2016, I was glad the more official release of Zeal & Ardor’s debut album,  Devil Is Fine , last year gave me the opportunity to talk about it (since I started this blog in 2017). Originally one of multiple solo music projects by creative eccentric Manuel Gagneux, inspired by a comical suggestion on 4Chan, Gagneux recruited ful-time members to form a complete performing band after the huge wave  Devil Is Fine  made, and I have been so pleased to see this project grow in its short time from the enthusiasm much of the metal community has shown for such an unorthodox artist. Devil Is Fine  was a short, but wildly diverse album (only 25 minutes) that blended the soulful blues of slave spirituals and other American folk with varyingly atmospheric black metal, a idea that could have gone terribly that fortunately went terrifically. While I loved  Devil Is Fine  and had it as one of my top top favorit...
Read more

Pensées Nocturnes - Grand Guignol Orchestra

Image
I have stated my distaste for the overdone try-hard edginess of the dark carnival aesthetic in film and television (and separating the band Avatar from that aesthetic has been a necessary task for me to prepare myself for their music), but something about applying it to the self-aware campiness of metal had me kind of intrigued to see what the exaggerated horror of metal could do for the often butchered scary circus aesthetic. I mentioned not too long ago that metal has always had its foot in parody through excess, and after all, isn’t the whole carnival thing supposed to be excessively cartoonish itself too? Maybe it could work. And that seems to be the hypothesis by which Pensées Nocturnes have approached this album. Pensées Nocturnes are a french band who have been rather prolific over the past decade,  Grand Guignol Orchestra  being the group’s sixth full-length album over the course of their decade-long existence. And the band have consistently sought to tinker and ...
Read more

Saor - Forgotten Paths

Image
Just as the new year delivered a new pair of Panopticon songs, so it gave us a new album from Andy Marshall’s Saor, a similarly naturalistic and folky solo project blending Scottish, rather than Appalachian, folk music with the transcendence of ambient black metal. In the visceral energy of this typically dark music form, Marshall finds strength and fortitude in the connection he makes with it to the natural world. Despite Marshall’s tendency toward sprawling compositions, their presentation of only three of them with one short outro cut to round them off clocks  Forgotten Paths  in at just over thrity-eight minutes. And in those thirty-eight minutes, Marshall really doesn’t do much more than channel the basic essence of his project. The opening title song jumps into the rushing swells of blast beats and black metal tremolo picking turned inside out to channel the silent emphatic resilience of the natural world itself portrayed so romantically in the song’s lyrics, soon e...
Read more