Review Summary: Three Days Grace's Meteora: a sometimes literal rehash of the first album, except done much better.
For anything in life, attempts at evolution can work both ways. Most times, they actually advance what potential there was in the first place, like when fish sprouted legs and turned into primeval earth-dwelling creatures, or when games started using 3D engines to increase realism. However, there is always the risk that you will overshoot (or undershoot) your mark and fall flat on your face. And nowhere is this premise truer than in the world of music. Every band has a stage in which they seek to expand their songwriting horizons, and go for something different, or at least more elaborate, then before. Most of these attempts, however, result in little more than sub-par albums, with ill-placed elements trying to advance what often didn’t need advancing in the first place.
Fortunately, a few bands manage to stay on the right side of evolutionary growth, and actually advance their careers with their second and third albums. Metallica leaped from
Kill ‘Em All to
Ride The Lightning, and a few years later to
Metallica; Linkin Park expanded on the premise of
Hybrid Theory with the similar-sounding, but overall superior
Meteora; Slipknot took a stumble with their
Vol. 3, but recovered in style with
All Hope Is Gone; and Three Days Grace managed to improve on their rather average debut with second outing
One-X.
Now, if you spotted the mention to
Meteora on the previous paragraph, it’s there for a reason.
One-X can be construed as TDG’s
Meteora, in that it follows a similar pattern: it is almost a rehash of the previous album, only done much better. In fact, on this album, the band continue to play their brand of angsty, mid-tempo radio-rock, present the same number of songs and an almost identical running time. But where before they sounded like a mixture between Puddle of Mudd and a D-grade nu-metal band, on this one they appear to be bridging the gap between Finger Eleven and Linkin Park. The sound has suffered a substantial downgrade in heaviness, with Adam Gontier’s voice even receding a few octaves, the nods to Nirvana have all but disappeared, but most of the songs can still be directly equated to those on the previous album. The difference is that they all, with few exceptions, sound better than those on
Three Days Grace.
Take the opener, for example. Like
Burn, It’s All Over is a somewhat anti-climactic slow-tempo song, but this time the hook is significantly better and the chorus somewhat more rousing. Similarly, follow-up
Pain is an almost direct re-tread of
Home, coming across as one of the few tracks that lose the battle with their 2003 counterparts. The following few songs are also easily comparable to those on the 2003 outing, but make for a much stronger group overall, even evidencing some nifty producing tricks, like the synthesized bridge on
Riot or the orchestrations on
Over And Over. The song structures themselves are also more developed, with most of the cuts now containing a bridge section that actually completes the lyrics.
However, the real surprise of this album comes after
Riot has given us our first, headbanging standout. From that point onward, the album transfigures itself completely, eschewing the basic, square power-rock of before in favor of a more sophisticated and, frankly, superior approach. Here, the listener will find tracks that actually seem to be trying to push TDG’s sound to the next level, with highlights
Get Out Alive and
One-X serving as good examples. The first bases itself around a funkier, electro-tinged percussion before exploding into the band’s usual brand of rabble-rousing rock, with the overall effect coming across as very similar to Linkin Park’s
Breaking The Habit; the second, with its echoey backing vocals, acoustic strumming and thundering percussion, sounds like something Three Days Grace may have picked up off the floor of
American Idiot’s recording room. However, rather than mere rip-offs, these tracks sound as genuine advances to the band’s sound, and work well next to other, smaller improvements like the orchestrations on
Over And Over.
Which isn’t to say, of course, that the simpler songs don’t work as well.
Gone Forever, Riot, Animal I Have Become and
Let It Die are all strong, fun modern-rock songs, and only
On My Own and
Time Of Dying can actually be considered filler, as they are both unoffending, but entirely forgettable songs. However, on the whole, the set of songs on this album is incredibly strong, and effectively puts its predecessor to shame.
However, as good as the music has become, the band still presents one huge Achilles’ heel: the lyrics. While they have, as mentioned, become more complete, not relying so much on chorus repetition, they are still incredibly whiny, a little fake-sounding, and aimed squarely at a single audience: teenagers. Statements like
”this world will never be/what I expected/and if I don’t belong/who would have guessed it” or
”we are the ones/we get knocked down/we get back up/and stand above the crowd” – not to mention the whole of
Riot - are directed solely at the “my-parents-hate-me” crowd, and will sound more than a bit cheesy to anyone over the age of 20. Elsewhere, there are still moments of lyrical amusement –
”and it gets under my skin/to see you giving in”, “so I’ll stay out all night/get drunk and f**k and fight” – and most of the songs now have a clearly discernible theme, but overall this is still the main factor turning most people away from the band.
If you can look past that, however,
One-X is an immensely pleasurable album to listen to. It might be a bit bold to put it up next to all-time classics of rock and metal, but it definitely deserves a place in the “Very Good” category. If you want something that is, at once, listenable, melodious, accessible, moderately heavy and actually good, you could do worse than start with this album. It’s a pity that, so far, it stands alone in the band’s discography as the shining peak of their achievements.
Recommended Tracks
Riot
Get Out Alive
Over And Over
One-X
