Review Summary: Skillet's Masterpiece
Every person has their childhood albums; That album that you adored as a child, and which still hits you hard even as you progress through life and discover more and more music. For me that album was
Alien Youth, the fifth album from Christian hard rock band Skillet.
This album was the first album to introduce me to the world of hard rock, and would lead me down the path to metal and other genres. I’m pretty sure I listened to it for over a month straight; something about it just grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. Starting off with "Alien Youth", a hard rocking, anthem style song, Skillet starts things off with a bang and only pauses for a short while. This album has a wonderful combination of heavy songs and ballad type songs, from the heavy "Vapor", to the mellow "You Are My Hope", and album closer "Come My Way".
Instrumentally
Alien Youth sees Skillet taking an electronic approach, utilizing a very sharp guitar tone, synths and samples, and somewhat subdued drums. "Eating Me Away" gives a good example of this, with the synth and keys taking the lead until the guitars and drums come in at the chorus, and then proceed to continue on through the rest of the song. The guitars are solid on this album, with some tasteful solos scattered throughout the album, and good chord and riff work in songs such as "Earth Invasion" and the ballads "One Real Thing" and "You Are My Hope". The bass is actually audible, but not enough to really tell if it’s doing anything different from the guitars. The drumming is pretty basic, with a nice fill here and there, most notably in "Vapor". The synths and keys are the main focus of the album, and provide lots of interesting tones and sounds to give some depth to
Alien Youth as a whole.
The biggest difference between
Alien Youth era Skillet and what most people have heard in their more recent stuff is the vocals. He still has the same tone of vocal, but they are far cleaner and less gritty then in recent works like
Comatose and
Alive. This is most evident in "Will You Be There", which combines the vocalist’s vocals, with the female guitarist/keyboardists vocals in a very nice cohesive ballad.
For as great as I believe
Alien Youth to be, there is one fault I can see: the order of the album. It goes from multiple heavy songs, to multiple ballads and back again. This kind of throws the listener for a loop, as you are all in the mood for heavy songs and then all of a sudden you get hit with multiple ballads, like where the last half goes from "Eating Me Away"/"Kill Me Heal Me" to "The Thirst is Taking Over"/"One Real Thing", and back to "Stronger"/"Rippin’ Me Off". It just seems too contrived for me, but this is not enough of a detriment to stay away from this album.
Throughout the years I have found many more bands and broadened my music taste, but
Alien Youth will always be a staple of my listening experience. This album has not lost it’s luster over all the years, and I highly recommend it even if you are not a fan of Christian bands or hard rock. It is a stellar piece of music.
