Evanescence 'Fallen' review
Release date: 2003
Label(s): Wind-Up
Duration: 44:19
Details
- Going Under
- Bring Me to Life
- Everybody's Fool
- My Immortal
- Haunted
- Tourniquet
- Imaginary
- Taking Over Me
- Hello
- My Last Breath
- Whisper
A blast from the recent past, Fallen is the astronomically selling breakthrough album from Evanescence that taught twelve-year-olds everywhere how to headbang. But is that really a good thing? No, no it's not...
One of the album's opening lines is "fifty thousand tears I've cried", which is a pretty telling precursor of the emotional rollercoaster you're in for. By the same token, the first track makes note of lead singer Amy Lee metaphorically "dying again", which will become a pretty common theme in every single song to follow. So get used to it.
The next song is ex-radio smash "Bring Me to Life," which is basically what you get when the lead singer of Limp Bizkit and his hypothetical wife have an argument: lots of whiny back-and-forth wailing and rapping.
Soon enough we're treated to "My Immortal," the song that would not die. This song, which was used in advertisements for the season finale of Friends, takes the universal theme of loss and throws it at you faster than you could ever possibly run. It is the quintessential insufferable ballad that is just abstract enough to use for anything, and just as the title portends, it was. On the one hand — the businessman hand — it's a brillianly structured piece of work that you could shamelessly sell to anyone having a funeral, candlelight vigil, or slow motion retrospective. On the other hand, it's a cold and calcuating song as ruthless as Hitler's war machine. While this song's radio dominance and utter mediocrity are loathsome, I have to commend Evanescence for writing a song so sinisterly relatable.
"Haunted," the album's fifth track, is only the third song about some kind of relationship gone awry only to spawn such torment that you have to wonder how anyone could write this many songs while engulfed in such pain. With this kind of lyrical track record, "Tourniquet" needs no explanation — they might as well have called it "Wahhhhh."
Eventually "Hello" comes around, which is like "My Immortal" but with a point. This song is easily one of the highlights of the album, with meaningful lyrics and dominated by decidedly somber piano. I'd say colour me impressed, but apparently the band just couldn't wait to speed things back up again and the following song is the same boring rock you've been listening to for the last half hour.
The final song, "Whisper," tries to be bombastic by including a choir and a wicked crazy guitar riff, but the electronically muddled vocals, the most generic chorus ever made ever (with a throwaway away/name/pain rhyme scheme), and a two minute outro consisting of nothing happening at all results in a song that fails to impress.
The bottom line is that this is an outlandishly generic album that occasionally spikes to either decent ("Everybody's Fool," the aforementioned "Hello") or inexcusably awful (Bring Me To Life), having only sold well thanks to the novelty of a female-fronted rock band, something that the entire European continent had perfected a decade prior. The musicianship is passable at best, the lyrics and rhyme constructions are laughable, and the songs are tailor-made for the terminally depressed teenage market. It's no wonder that ex-guitarist Ben Moody writes pop songs for Kelly Clarkson now — the carefully calculated success of My Immortal surely had some kind of allure.
Fallen is the soundtrack to a mediocre band flailing about in the water after diving headfirst into commercial success, slowly sinking away from the public eye, and becoming doomed to slink around the bottom of the pond for the rest of their careers.
4/10