Flyleaf: Flyleaf (A&M/Octone, 2005)
Clean, melodic, Christian-themed metal with unusual chord progressions -- seems like a pretty weird combination. But the band has also figured out how to convey Christian messages without coming off as moralizing or cheesy: focus on suffering and specific personal stories, rather than merely singing abstractly about God's positive qualities. Lacey Sturm's personal struggles definitely help her and her band pull this off better than they would've been able to otherwise, giving the music a valuable degree of authenticity. Combining the positive and uplifting message seemingly baked into Christian rock -- if not Christianity itself -- with these raw, scary, stories of personal suffering is hard enough, but throw in Sturm's attempt to combine weirdly complex melodies with intermittent screaming of the sort one would expect in more conventional metal, and it becomes a truly formidable balancing act. It's impressive that Sturm and her bandmates are attempting it at all, and they are clearly successful to some extent, so that the combination of the band's noisy power chords, enthusiastic vocals, and sincere lyrics ends up rendering the entire album perfectly listenable. I remember when "All Around Me" was at or near the top of the iTunes
charts back in 2008, and I am partial to its chorus, as well as those of
"Breathe Today" and "So I Thought". But the strangely written, inaccessible, meandering melodies that pervade each of the album's tracks to some extent or another ultimately prevent the music from becoming truly enjoyable or engaging listening. And while the music isn't as cloying as more positive Christian rock music sometimes is, the downside of the more raw, suffering-based lyrics here is that it makes the songs come off as too heavy-handed and somber to really effectively reach out and grab the listener. You can tell the band's going for a vibe of overcoming adversity through God, but this intended positivity ultimately gets overwhelmed by the emphasis on the negative. It seems like the minor-key melodies and screaming indicate a message of pessimism fundamentally at odds with the intended message of inspiration evident in the lyrics, and this contradiction drags the album down. C PLUS
Muse: Black Holes and Revelations (Warner Bros., 2006)
Something about this band has always struck me as weirdly vapid, like the substance underlying their fancy, grandiose songwriting hasn't been there. Here they come off as a manlier Coldplay, with much more guitar noise, weird lyrics, ear-catching sound effects of various types, and, as mentioned before, grandiose songwriting. The flip side of that is that they also come off as a diet Radiohead, with a lot of the rougher, weirder edges shaved off. Hard to pigeonhole the genre of this music, but "arena-prog-power-pop-rock" seems fairly close. It's a sort of punk rock for people who don't like the scary, rebellious aspects of real punk rock and want the rebellious message watered down somewhat so they can handle it, but not so much that it's no longer noticeable. This shows up in the recurring anti-authoritarian/dictator/war themes in the lyrics. Pretty good melodies throughout, and the band shows a notable mastery of the crucial art of appealing rhythmic structure. Lots of passion in the vocals and tons of complicated arrangements. In short, this album is enjoyable to listen to in much the same way that it is "fun" to watch an action movie, with its rapid pace, in-your-face action, and myriad special effects. But the necessary distancing between real musicians and abstract, fictional subject matter serves as an obstacle that can only be overcome by deep investment in songwriting and lyrical delivery. The consequences of this obstacle in the music include a general feeling that the singer, despite his obvious energy, does not really believe what he is singing, in part because any larger political message to be found here has been watered down to avoid pointing to anyone specific. It's as though the soul and sincerity in the music, assuming it was ever there in the first place, was sanded away so that the glimmering melodies and showy instrumentation would be easier for listeners to hear. Another consequence is that trying to transmute epic action movies into music, especially when any "plot" of the movie is shredded into tiny, unrecognizable pieces in the album's lyrics, is inherently doomed to less-than-complete success, because the two media are fundamentally different in how they entertain. This was an obstacle for 30 Seconds to Mars as well, though here the songwriting and general musicianship is better able to help to overcome that obstacle. Well worth a listen, however, if only for the fun of the (inconsistently) catchy melodies and (consistently) engaging arrangements. B
