Review Summary: One step forward, two steps back.
How do you follow up your best work to date!? This question seems to ail many a dweller of the music world, as it is common to see bands release a groundbreaking album – one which both refines their recipe and pushes it to a new level – then immediately follow it up with a vastly underwhelming one. Examples are countless: Metallica following up their Black Album with the two
Loads and the turgid
St. Anger; AC/DC releasing
For Those About To Rock as a segue to the tandem of
Highway To Hell and
Back In Black; Megadeth releasing
Cryptic Writings and
Risk after
Countdown and
Youthanasia; and, more recently, Three Days Grace following the excellent
One-X with the dreary
Life Starts Now.
Effectively, along with some of the examples on the previous paragraph, this album could serve as a poster-child for “follow-up syndrome”. At first glance, it’s no different than its two predecessors: once again, we get twelve songs spread out over a running time of approximately forty-five minutes, and once again the prevailing sound is heavy, yet mainstream hard rock. There are even a few evolutionary tricks left over from
One-X. The only difference? The songs are
boring.
In fact, where the self-titled debut introduced us to an eager young band, and
One-X showed that same band as mature, refined songwriters, all we get on
Life Starts Now is a band uninterestedly going through the motions, with the autopilot firmly set to coast over all the mandatory landmarks (“we’ll have the rousing anthem
here, the power ballad
here and a more sprightly song
there”). The result is a vastly underwhelming album that may well kill what seemed to be a promising career.
Right off the bat, one senses something isn’t right.
Bitter Taste is a decent opener, but something seems to be amiss;
Break confirms this feeling by being one of those cute, but instantly forgettable tracks TDG concoct so well. And while third track – and rare standout –
World So Cold threatens to change the tide, the following songs quickly confirm our worst suspicions: this is going to be a painfully unremarkable album.
In fact, where
Three Days Grace made up for its flaws with a handful of catchy tunes and
One-X was an immensely pleasing listening experience, this one is an absolute chore to sit through. The songwriting has taken a conscious step back, for some reason, and the gigantic choruses the band used to have such a penchant for have all but disappeared. All that’s left is a vortex of slow tempos, acoustic strumming and snore-inducing radio-driven blandness. The worst moments on here rival Nickelback or Creed for nondescript facelessness, which is nothing sort of jarring when one considers past songs such as
Home or
Gone Forever. And even when the band inject a little more pace into their music, they come across as little more than a second-rate American Hi-Fi ripoff, like on
Good Life.
Ironically enough,
Good Life is probably as close as this album comes to a second standout, but that merit derives solely from the fact that it is a virtual re-write of the infinitely superior
Riot, from
One-X. Other than it and
World So Cold, the only songs which really grab your attention are the opener (because, well, it’s the opener, and your interest’s still on high) and
Last To Know (because it sounds like a bad pastiche of a particularly whiny Coldplay track, right down to the falsetto on the word
”love”). Everything else will elicit no reaction from you other than irritated glances at the CD timer.
Thank Vishnu, then, for
World So Cold. Probably the only really inspired song on this album, this is a vintage slab of TDG, evidencing all the characteristics one might like about the band, and earning its place next to similar tracks such as
Over And Over. Unfortunately, it’s over far too quickly, mercilessly throwing the listener into the wasteland that is the rest of the album, where three-minute tracks wear out their welcome at the 60-second mark.
So, as you can gather, this is an extremely pedestrian album…at a musical level. Yes, ironically, it’s the lyrics that actually shine on a TDG album this time around. Adam Gontier seems to finally have gone out of adolescence, and while most of the songs still deal with the negative side of life, they are now delivered more from a lovelorn perspective than the previous “everyone-hates-me” drivel. There’s even the odd – gasp! –
positive message, with these moments in particular coming very close to the Christian-rock snoozefest of Creed. Occasionally, the band even dares to tackle a more serious subject, such as bullying and violent teens on – duh –
Bully, but these matters are unfortunately handled in an exceedingly basic fashion –
”maybe they needed to be wanted”? Really? There is also no excuse for lines like
”at night I feel like a vampire” – rhyming with
”higher”, no less! – or
”took me down to the river so I could drown, drown, drown”, but overall there has been a huge improvement in this particular aspect of TDG’s songwriting. It’s only a pity that the musical side doesn’t hold up to it, instead taking a very definite step back in complexity and quality.
Overall, then, this is an album that will only interest TDG fans and completists. As a nice rounding-up addition to your collection, it will hold some diminutive shred of merit; but as a musical oeuvre, and particularly as a follow up to an above-par album, it fails utterly and miserably. Sorry, Three Days Grace, but unless you’re very lucky, it will be more like
Life Ends Now for you.
Recommended Tracks
World So Cold
The Good Life
