Review Summary: More like Damp Squibs.
Nineteen years is a long time. In that time span, a human child can go from newborn to legal adult, most animals will have completed their life cycle, and any given artistic scene will have gone through at least a couple of revolutions in mainstream trends and tastes, mainly derived from the average fanbase's natural progression from teenage angst to job-family-and-mortgage maturity.
Unfortunately, most artists are far too slow on the uptake when it comes to this realisation, resulting in creative endeavours which – depending on the artist's caliber and field of expertise – may appear more or less behind the times. The music world, in particular, is rife with examples of acts which appear to have remained stuck in a time loop, staunchly refusing to progress beyond the point at which they first encountered success, and spiralling into irrelevancy as a result.
Case in point: Three Days Grace, who, two decades after releasing their debut album (unless, that is, one counts the teenage folly that was Groundswell) and a quarter of a century after playing their first notes together, reach their seventh album at the exact same junction they were in almost exactly a decade ago, upon the release of Adam Gontier's final outing with the group, 2012's
Transit of Venus. Nowhere across the thirty-eight minutes of nominally new music that make up the brand new
Explosions is anything even approaching innovation ever attempted: on the contrary, this album sees the group firmly entrenched in the same comfort zone as the likes of Billy Talent, forever retreading the same chunky riffs, square beats and angsty lyrics they were peddling in their early-2000s heyday.
There
is, at least,
some progression along the curve, with continued attempts at keeping song tempos and structures more varied (even if a solid half of these tracks still ultimately resolve into the trademark big, dumb Three Days Grace mid-tempo stomper) and refraining from rushing to the chorus the way they used to under Gontier; likewise, the band continues to lightly experiment with their sound, with keyboards and string sections (in one instance, played by cello metallers Apocalyptica) subbing in for
Venus's electronic elements. All of these aspects are, however, considered par for the course even for artists ten or fifteen years younger than the members of Three Days Grace – most of which would also be expected to come up with lyrics above the high-school poetry level being displayed by these professional, forty-something-year-old musicians.
In fact, even more so than the relatively stagnant music, it is
Explosions' lyrics which truly help cement its '
same old, same old' nature. Eight albums and twenty-five years into their career (counting the Groundswell release, which, incudentally, had far superior lyrics than any of Three Days Grace's albums, despite the musicians being in their actual teens at the time), these Canadians continue to explore themes of angst, inadequacy, loss, self-confidence and coming of age - all of which they should have arguably moved on from at this point, anyway - with all the subtlety of a fifteen-year-old at the end of a particularly bad week at school. Even attempts to deliver more genuinely emotional messages, like the heartfelt paean to a lost loved one on
Lifetime, are undermined by exceedingly basic, trite lyrical imagery, which ultimately renders the message risible rather than touching – a flaw Matt Walst's vocals (unlike Gontier's) are far too lacking in personality to be able to make up for.
In fact, the most likely feeling running through a long-time listener's mind when assessing these ten new songs might be of longing for Gontier, whose voice would fit like a glove into (not to mention elevate) most of this material, particularly stronger cuts such as
Neurotic (the most Three Days Grace song on the album) or the bombastic title track, which sees the band save the best for last and deliver perhaps the only genuinely great moment on the album. Competent though he is, Walst is simply too generic of a singer to ever differentiate this band's sound the way his predecessor did, and lacks Gontier's ability to craft a huge, perennial earworm of a chorus, which ultimately ends up harming the few almost-bangers this album manages to put across; the fact that, three albums in, he still comes across as the 'replacement vocalist' should give the band pause.
Then again, judging by the output presented on
Explosions, Three Days Grace are probably not too concerned about sounding stale, delivering fair-to-middling material, or even less-than-subtly aping acts younger - and sometimes worse - than themselves (
Champion is a Skillet song, right down to the title,
Redemption evokes Billy Talent's similarly-themed - and better executed -
Forgiveness, and the title track evokes Bruno Mars'
Sky Full of Lighters while also giving off vintage Imagine Dragons vibes, back before Dan Reynolds went full radio-sellout); rather, the 2022 iteration of Three Days Grace is so far into its comfort zone that it has barricaded all its doors and windows to make an underground bunker. Sadly, this unwilingness to push their sound forward or, indeed, mature as musicians means
Explosions makes for a stultifyingly flat listening experience, which delivers precious little by way of memorable cuts (even after a few spins, the average listener will remember half a chorus or two, at best) and which, while not bad per se (it is at about the same level as the final two Gontier albums, and leagues above Walst's previous endeavour, the turgid My Darkest Days) easily stands as Three Days Grace's most irrelevant release to date; indeed, while the Canadians might have been hoping their seventh album would
explode into the mainstream rock scene, the end result is more like a damp squib.
Recommended Tracks
Neurotic
Champion
Explosions
