A Popular Option For Poser-Goths: Fallen By Evanescence!

The Good: Great voice, Some interesting lyrics
The Bad: Some lame rhymes, Tries to be something inorganic
The Basics: While presenting lyrics about death, dying and loss, Fallen mixes a sound that is hard to reconcile and appears to be about exploiting the untapped Goth mainstream market.


I'll begin this review by simply saying that the popular music world is better off with Evanescence than without it. It's nice to hear a sound that combats the Blonde Revolution. This is not a band with a Blonde Wonder lead singer. But it's also not the best it could be, largely due to keeping a pretense of being something it does not appear to be.

Fallen, the breakthrough album for Evanescence spawned the radio-popular single "Bring Me To Life" and had such radio-friendly singles as "Going Under" (which appropriately ended up on the promos for Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel) and "My Immortal." The group quickly gained a reputation as the premiere Goth band of our time.

That's rubbish.

Evanescence's lyrics are darker than the average popular band, to be sure. For example, on the track "Hello" lead singer Amy Lee plaintively sings "Rain clouds come to play again / Has no one told you she's not breathing?" It is atypical to hear so many songs about death or the state near death on a popular album that we hear on Fallen. And the album works on that front. Unfortunately, that's not what makes it what I'll call "poser Goth."

Goths are supposed to be dark and mysterious, indifferent and hard. It's what the subculture stands for. Did you think it was just wearing black?! Fallen is way too exposed for that. This is an album of yearning. Even on one of the less good tracks, "Everybody's Fool," there is anger and hurt, as the narrator wails "Have you no shame, don't you see me?" The exceptional "My Immortal" is a cry of pain, the expression of an open wound of loss.

And "My Immortal" leads me to the argument I make with Fallen and Evanescence trying to be something it is not necessarily. Evanescence is packaged as some form of pseudo-Goth music relying on the radio on the heavy metal chords to break through the emotions of the lyrics. On "Bring Me To Life" the band rocks hard and includes Paul McCoy for additional guitar and vocal support.

But that's not who Evanescence actually is. On Fallen, "My Immortal" is not plagued by the guitar noise that comes to usher in the last stanza. Instead, Amy Lee's voice carries the song. The song is about loss and sorrow and there is no grand climax to that, there is just the continuation of sorrow. On Fallen, Evanescence mortgages appearance for substance and it works. The radio edit of "My Immortal" is designed to sell discs to those who enjoyed "Bring Me To Life." It's too bad, because the album version is far superior, much the way Natalie Merchant's original, non-pop produced version of "Jealousy" was.

The climax of the album continues this same essential problem. Fallen goes out on a big, Goth-like chant with "Whisper" when the song before it, "My Last Breath" is the perfect closing track to an emotive album. It is melodic and seductive, crying out for the attention of "Holding my last breath / Safe inside myself / All my thoughts of you / Sweet raptured light it ends here tonight." It is a song of an ending and it sounds like an end. It's too bad the band chose to not close with that track.

And some of the lyrics are plagued by typical, overdone rhymes. On "Everybody's Fool" we have the overdone "be/me" rhyme with "Never was and never will be / You don't know how you've betrayed me." And "Hello" rhymes "again" with "again." I loathe that. I call it Avril Syndrome. Evanescence is better than that.

What works completely from start to finish on Fallen are the vocals of Amy Lee. She has a great voice, not quite Sally Ellyson of Hem, but she's impressive. Through all the chaos of background instrumentals and occasional clunky lyrics, Amy Lee's voice is a force to be reckoned with.

In the final analysis, though, Fallen is a darkly-themed pop album that is trying to fill a market niche that is screaming for exploitation. While Evanescence has effectively capitalized on that, it is unclear if they are the right band for that. The schizophrenic way they present themselves is disturbing as opposed to genuine. This is a good album for anyone looking for a different sound, though. Or if they have a poser-Goth they need to get a gift for. This is Goth the way Hot Topics is Goth.

The best track is easily "My Immortal" (though I continue to find myself more and more impressed by "Imaginary") and the worst song is "Everybody's Fool."

For other, similar, works, be sure to check out my reviews of:
The Open Door - Evanescence
Tear The World Down - We Are The Fallen
Icon - Imogen Heap & Frou Frou

7/10

For other music reviews, please be sure to visit my Music Review Index Page!

© 2012, 2006 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.
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Opening A Door To More of The Same (Sort Of): Evanescence’s The Open Door

The Good: Excellent voice, Defined sense of musical niche, Generally good lyrics
The Bad: Nothing terribly new, Holistic view of the album is rather average
The Basics: While solid in and of itself, The Open Door illustrates little real growth for Evanescence, though it is arguably a better album than Fallen.


It is a rare thing that I will go back to one of my prior reviews and reread it before reviewing something new. In some cases, I suppose this leads to an inconsistency in the way I rate things. For example, I'm not truly sure The White Stripes's album Get Behind Me Satan (reviewed here!) actually is better than Elephant (though I know it's chic to think that), but looking through my reviews, it seems that's how I rated them at the time. I know I have Elephant (reviewed here!) on my shelf and not Get Behind Me Satan and I've not had any particular compulsion to go out and buy the latter. I did, however, feel compelled to go back and reread my review of Fallen by Evanescence before reviewing their latest work, The Open Door.

I reread my review of Fallen because in listening to The Open Door, an experience I was eager for having heard "Call Me When You're Sober" at least fifty times on the radio and loving it every time, I felt that this album was something I had heard before. Rereading my review for Fallen, I found many of my critiques of that album held, save that the lyrics seem better on The Open Door and the musical accompaniment to Amy Lee was more consistently heavy rock with less Goth pretense.

I think I would be happy working for a general magazine that received advanced copies of media and rating them. I could see me in an editorial room betting on artists, albums, movies, political movements. I think I'd enjoy it, though I might consistently lose my paycheck; I've been betting on open revolution in the United States for years now and I'm continually amazed at the complacency of the citizenry (a populace unphased by a government that is spying on it baffles me). That said, given that I haven't listened to the radio much lately, I'd bet Evanescence's next single off The Open Door would be "Lithium." If not, it ought to be.

"Call Me When You're Sober" continues a trend of Evanescence songs that showcases Amy Lee's strong vocals with a musical backing that is heavy metal. There, I said it. "Going Under," the radio edit of "My Immortal," the number one "Bring Me To Life," and "Call Me When You're Sober" all have guitars heavy enough to be called heavy metal; at least the type of popular heavy metal reminiscent of Metallica's "Enter Sandman." That's my frame of reference; I'm not much of a metal fan, but I've finally hit the nail on the head. Evanescence is just a metal band with a female lead singer.

And a piano. Damn, I forgot about that.

Okay, maybe Evanescence isn't easy to classify outside quasi-metal pop-rock. Despite the preponderance of dark lyrics ("death"/"dying" appears on four songs - five in the abstract with "Cloud Nine" - "dark" or "darkness" is a lyric in seven of the thirteen tracks and other cheerful words include: "drown," "loneliness," "shame," "screaming," "emptiness," etc.), Evanescence abandons the Goth-starkness of Fallen in favor of the airplay-familiar sound of the band. So, for example, on Fallen, "My Immortal" is completely powered by the vocals of Amy Lee and her piano, while the radio version is mucked up in the last stanza with the rest of the band blaring in on their guitars. On The Open Door, all of the tracks are the full band, none are like the Fallen version of "My Immortal," save the final track, "Good Enough," which works well to close out the album.

And that's the album's greatest strength and weakness. The group seems less like it is trying to straddle two niches and instead feels like it has picked what it wants to be. It abandons the stark Goth-pop, Hot Topics poser culture in favor of the new metal, tattoos and body piercing "we're all different, but in the same way" fringe of pop culture. And now that the band has its direction, the problem is that it's nothing new. Evanescence has settled into its sound, but playing Fallen back to back with The Open Door one feels they have simply been listening to a continual experience, as opposed to the next step in a band's evolution. My favorite example of this phenomenon is Everclear; their songs all sound generally the same, but it's a cool sound, so we tend to forgive them, but when one listens to their albums, that weakness is highlighted. Evanescence is the voice of dark pop-rock, metal in the mainstream.

What does this mean to you, the listener?

If you like "Call Me When You're Sober," you're likely to enjoy The Open Door. Thematically, this is a fairly homogenous album. It's a solid listening experience in and of itself. But for those who fell in love with Evanescence via Fallen, this is merely more of the same. The lyrics are generally dark and pensive, like Lee's sad "Like You," which opens "Stay low / Soft, dark, and dreamless / far beneath my nightmares / and loneliness / I hate me / For breathing without you . . ."

And perhaps that makes for a better album; I keep finding a new track running through my mind, which is rare for an album that I feel repeats the same sound as a prior album. My recommendation is based largely on the idea that Amy Lee's vocals continue to impress me and her lyrics (she wrote or co-wrote all thirteen tracks) are poetic and good. This is an album that would probably grow on me.

So, this was one of my more fragmented reviews and there's a simple explanation for that; The Open Door is better than a lot of music out there, "Call Me When You're Sober" is certainly the best song I hear on the pop-rock stations these days. But I recognize that Evanescence is not truly growing on this album, merely accepting the niche they are filling more completely. But even as I recognize that, the track changes and I find myself engaged by the next song and the next. Maybe this is what happened to me when I listened to "Get Behind Me Satan" by the White Stripes . . .

Damn. Maybe, despite not growing, The Open Door is a better album than Fallen simply because Evanescence seems less conflicted about what kind of music they want to make. Either way, the difficult task of ending the review is complicated by my usual form. Here I usually pick the best and worst tracks. "Weight of the World," the third track, continues to underimpress me after ten listens, but picking the best track is hard. So, for a change, I won't; Evanescence might not be growing with The Open Door, but I will! To that end, all I will say about a best track is that while "Call Me When You're Sober" is a phenomenal song, I don't believe it is the best track on The Open Door.

For other intriguing female-driven bands, be sure to visit my reviews of:
Two Suns - Bat For Lashes
Tear The World Down - We Are The Fallen
Eveningland - Hem

7.5/10

For other music reviews, be sure to visit my Music Review Index Page for an organized listing!

© 2012, 2007 W.L. Swarts. May not be reprinted without permission.

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