|
Music |
|
 |
|
A side project, within a side project,
within a failure
The Advocate
Dead by Sunrise may be this band’s name, but it may also be a reference to the hope anyone may have had that this would be a good album.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington started this side project as an outlet for songs he had written that were not quite right for his current band.
Considering the success of Linkin Park, one’s high hopes for this album would be justified. Linkin Park may have its critics but they do make some good music from time to time. Even if someone isn’t a fan of their particular sound, it is hard to deny that they are a band that can generate single after single.
So what went wrong with Mr. Bennington’s little project? I believe the mistakes are threefold: First mistake, he thought that he possessed enough song-writing talent to form a band around; second mistake, he wrote most of the songs on an acoustic guitar then chose a band with musical backgrounds in nothing but odd electro-rock-fusion; third, he then chose a producer (Howard Benson) who was fully willing to polish the whole deal up nicely, tell everyone it was great, overproduce the album art and then call it a day.
I don’t think anyone will confuse this for Linkin Park at all. If that was one of Bennington’s objectives when he made this album, then he managed to succeed at something other than creating a musical failure. There may be a couple songs that begin with the tempo and vocal trappings of Chester’s other band but then, just at the moment that a Linkin Park song would break into an adrenaline-fueled thrash-fest, the song breaks into a yawn-fueled suck-fest.
This album would have sounded pretty good if it had been played on acoustic guitar the way that some of the tracks were originally written. The influence of Chester’s bandmates is what may have completely ruined this album’s chance at success. Instead of rhythmic guitar playing with melodic vocals, the listeners, are forced to hear a depressed, fully castrated version of the usually energetic Chester Bennington whine away as a talentless quintet of failure plods along behind him meticulously reducing nearly every ounce of music they may produce into mechanical noises.
Lead singer aside, the remainder of this band is an entourage of absolute failure. Four of the group’s members, Ryan Shuck, Amir Derakh, Brandon Belsky and Elias Andra, are actually an entire sub-par parade of a band by themselves called Julien-K, which is apparently a byproduct of another debacle entirely. Shuck and Derakh formed this band as a side project while in synth-rock group Orgy. Then there is Anthony Alcic, who has been involved in tons of synth-electro-failure-rock hybrid bands, none of which anyone with ears has ever willingly listened to.
The only way any album could achieve a rating of 1.5 out of 5 is if they were to not only wound my sense of hearing, but if they could then rub salt or a bit of lemon in that wound as well. The disappointment from the electronic sound of this album is simply the wound in this case. The lyrics are most decidedly the salt.
Earlier I had stated that these songs could have sounded better if they had been played on an acoustic guitar instead of a robot. Well, they may have sounded good musically, but lyrically they still would have sucked. At times it seems that Bennington’s only goal when writing this album was to make sure the words rhymed. Although a theme is conveyed through these rhyming words, it is only barely audible. At this album’s worst, I couldn’t imagine how someone could stand on stage, sing these songs and expect to be taken seriously. At this album’s best, the lyrics are simplistic and trite.
The final product of all these separate parts is an album with nearly no redeeming qualities. The songs are over-produced and suck, the album art is filled with half-naked 40-somethings sporting too much eye-liner, and Best Buy’s return policy doesn’t involve an apology and 44 minutes of my life back.
There are only two groups of people who would receive any joy from buying this album: goth kids from 1998 and sarcastic journalism students who like trashing bad music in reviews.
Avoid wasting your money on this album at any cost.
The Advocate reserves the right to not publish comments based on their appropriateness.