Review Summary: Tonight we rise? I'm Ron Burgundy?
At this point in time, Skillet was at a very low point in their career: they still hadn’t achieved the successful fusion they found on
Collide or even the inferior
Comatose and had furthered their decline since their 2003 release with the colossal failure
Awake. They had three years for
Comatose and it barely sounded like it required any true effort, and the three years for
Awake just found the band loving Nickelback-esque power ballads and filling that record with either watered down versions of the better tracks from Comatose or the aforementioned, terrible power ballads. They knew that even die-hard fans were ready to jump off the bandwagon and they needed a power play. So, this time, they toured with more matured bands such as RED, Stone Sour, and Seether, and took four years for
Rise. More time spent both in studio and with more talented acts should’ve given them some perspective and inspiration, right?
Let’s address the first elephant in the room: John’s voice on this release ranges from halfway decent to downright terrible. Yes, this is a genre that requires a bit more from the vocal chords and Skillet has been going for a while, but there’s training and plenty of vocal exercises a singer can perform in order to still keep on top of their game. Michael Barnes(RED) can still croon beautifully, sing clearly, and scream like he’s possessed both live and in studio, Benjamin Burnley (Breaking Benjamin) suffers from many illnesses and sounds great, and Kevin Young (Disciple) alternates between a southern drawl and ferocious howls both on record and live. His voice is a major detractor for the majority of the record. And he still can’t contribute anything worthwhile on the bass. Further speaking of vocals, drummer Jen Ledger contributes even more than on
Awake and it’s also mainly a detractor. It’s not that she has a bad voice, per se, but she’s consistently stifled by autotune and it grows very grating. Her contributions on the kit are a little more noteworthy than before but still not to
Collide or even
Comatose standards. On past Skillet releases, former lead guitarist Ben Kasica wrote both lead and rhythm guitar lines, and for about seventy percent of the time he wrote both enjoyable solos and heavy, detuned riffs played by Korey Cooper on rhythm guitar. This time, Seth Morrison takes his place, and it’s safe to assume that with the added keyboard influence on this record, Korey didn’t contribute a whole lot to guitars as a whole and Seth mainly wrote the riffs. And for a couple songs, they work well, but for the most part, it’s either overly showy soloing or just pounding a couple different power chords over and over. The strings don’t do anything different: don’t misunderstand, I realize that there’s only a couple ways to make strings sound inherently different. What I mean is that they are played in the exact same arrangements as they’ve been played in the past: “Awake and Alive”, “Comatose”, “Rebirthing”, it’s all copied here. The keyboards don’t really add or detract, they sound cool on “Sick of It” but just come off as there for the most part.
It’s tough to discuss standouts here, because so much of this is pretty bad. The Skillet curse since
Comatose is that they do have occasionally good moments in predominantly sub-par or straight up bad songs. “Rise”, “Sick of It”, and “Madness In Me” all have strong, thick Drop C riffs that almost distract from the bad atmosphere surrounding them. If you liked
Comatose to a die-hard level, I guess you could enjoy “Not Gonna Die”, because it sounds like a cheap
Comatose b-side. But man, there are a lot of really crappy songs here that deserve mention because of just how bad they are. “My Religion” tries to be a soulful, southern gospel-inspired rocker, but the cheesy guitar line, laughable lyrics (this is coming from a Christian. John just cannot deliver lyrics on this track), and the tacky organ and gang chant just crash the track. “American Noise” and “Good To Be Alive” are easily the worst Skillet ballads ever crafted: this is where you can tell they were trying to cash in on the Of Monsters and Men/Imagine Dragons phase that was hitting at the time of this release.
Lyrically, this is horrid. Every song is some sort of dramatic war cry that sounds like it took five minutes to pen. And this is coming from someone who again likes angstier lyrics, but this is just laughably bad and comes across as very lazy.
Well, if you thought Skillet couldn’t get any worse with
Awake, you were wrong. It’s a close shave, but
Rise is the worst of the two and is painful to listen to from track one.
