Review Summary: Nothing new here, Three Days Generic remains way past their grace period for something fresh.
The best characterization of Three Days Grace’s muscular style of rock is, well, an actual geological rock. A hulking chunk of course granite that is repeatedly bashed into your head with the aim of it getting stuck in your head. Some of it does – “I Hate Everything About You,” “Just Like You”; a lot of it doesn’t – “Home,” “Pain,” “World So Cold.” The drudging tempos, chugging riffs and rhythms composed into melodies a 10-year-old could write are all back again in what feels like the umpteenth go-around. It’s only the fifth since the Canadian quartet’s 2003 eponymous debut. And like always, Three Days Grace attempts to smell like teen spirit but instead reek of hormonal angst on
Human.
There is one change, however, with former My Darkest Days vocalist Matt Walst taking over for Adam Gontier. Although Walst conveyed the sort of swagger needed for My Darkest Day’s rave-tinged anthems, he certainly is a downgrade here. He does his best Gontier impression, but he just doesn’t have the sheer rawness that his predecessor possessed in spades to deliver with any conviction the sort of lyrics ripped from the high school poetry assignment written by that leather jacket-clad dude who just brooded in the back of class when he didn’t skip to smoke cigarettes, work on motorcycles and drag race. Yep, they’re that poor and might be the worst of the group’s discography, which is saying something: It’s pretty tough to top a single that boasted the likes of “
Pain! Without love / Pain! Can’t get enough / Pain! I like it rough because I’d rather feel pain than nothing at all.” When Walst isn’t comparing troubled romance to an automobile accident in “Car Crash” or describing himself as an anesthetic for a broken heart in “Painkiller,” he’s recycling the same sort of self-deprecating existential crises in the songs like “Landmine” and “I Am Machine” with which the band and many contemporaries have defined their careers.
As for the aforementioned single “I Am Machine,” Three Days Grace put forth the quintessential sort of slab of igneous that hammers the noggin into begrudging, guilty submission. The alt-metal windup verses erupt into a sing-along chorus fueled by drawn-out power chords and perhaps Walst’s best performance of the record. It may be a rehash of “Pain,” but it’s definitely an improvement on it and overall is on better side of the spectrum of Three Days Grace’s hits.
However, it’s tough pickings to find anything else worth not skipping. After “I Am Machine”’s appearance in the middle of the album,
Human quickly becomes a collection of filler so trite that it’s is more likely to make you fall asleep at the bench press instead of max-out. The front half has the somewhat catchy stuff, but nothing is really a highlight. Opener “Human Race” has a guitar solo that can’t salvage the song from the doldrums of Walst’s repetitive rasps. “Painkiller” and “Landmine” are hopelessly generic. “Fallen Angel” is just a slower version of “Time of Dying,” though it’s understandable for the group to try to reclaim its 2006 thunder.
Undoubtedly, Three Days Grace peaked with
One-X. With a few exceptions, everything since has been repackaged sets of the same type of bleak post-grunge the aggro-rock veterans need to evolve from. Their best tracks always feature deviations from the formula like the stalking bass line in “Animal I Have Become” or the up-tempo and empowering chorus in “Break.”
Human, however, is as uninspired as mainstream rock comes. Ironically, it feels very much the work of a machine that will be forgotten and outdone well before Breaking Benjamin’s
Dark Before Dawn retakes the butt-rock throne.
