Review Summary: Something not great starts now
Three Days Grace made one of the first albums I loved, but they also made one of the first albums that disappointed me. Disappointed as in "I expected so much more", and "this doesn’t feel like the band I knew, for many contradictory reasons". The kind of emotions any music lover will experience at some point, combined with the sinking feeling that if the band doesn’t get ahold of themselves, their career might be hurt beyond repair.
Opener “Bitter Taste” is a good example of the albums’s strengths and weaknesses. It’s one of their trademark angry break-up songs, with a mean, heavy riff and even meaner lyrics. “I have escaped the bitter taste of you” concludes the chorus. But it’s the lyrics that feel really bitter, claiming that the narrator hasn’t just forgotten his ex, he also has to tell her that she’s nothing, not just nothing to him but nothing at all, with lines like “As your world disassembles, better keep your head up” and “Betrayed, disgraced, you’ve been erased”. The guitar work is nice, but the lyrics are too petty to be really satisfying.
But there’s something else, harder to explain, in that song: the riffs are thick and heavy, like on most of the album, and the production is perfectly clean, you can hear everything loud and clear. That would be great in theory, but it just feels a little too clean, while the riffs and melodies are too generic. That’s what I meant by saying that this doesn’t feel like “my” Three Days Grace. I don’t like saying that. Obviously, I don’t own the band, I can’t ask them to keep making the same music forever, but I have the weird feeling that they’re no longer good at what they used to be good at, and that feels awful.
Oddly enough, some tracks are enjoyable precisely because they’re somewhat brighter and catchier, like the wildly energetic “The Good Life” and the pretty fun “Break”. They have heavy yet clean-sounding riffs, but other than that, they’re basically pop-rock songs with an electro influence, like what other similar bands would end up making during the 2010s. It’s good to hear Three Days Grace trying something new and more upbeat, and while those aren’t exactly my favorite songs of theirs, they’re still fun. But their other attempts at something poppier, more mainstream, go completely flat.
For example, there’s the obvious radio single “Lost in You”, a completely forgettable rock ballad that could be used as background noise at a mall. The other ballad, “Last to Know” is a little better, portraying sadness after a break-up in a more believable way, but it essentially repeats the same notes until the last verse. But “Without You” is a softer rock song about the same topic, told in a completely bland way. I’m not sure what to think about the title track: on a bad day, one might feel inspired by those “you’ve survived everything” lyrics, but it’s basically a less interesting version of “One X”.
Of course, some songs still have what was good about previous 3DG albums. “World So Cold” has a simple yet dark and eerie riff, followed by Adam Gontier’s moody singing. It has a lot of the old Three Days Grace darkness, and it’s pretty enjoyable if you can forget the bland “I’m so lost without you” lyrics. “No More” has a similar melancholic and desperate tone, though its lyrics have a similar subject to “World So Cold”. The break-up songs in this album are extremely simple, they’re either sad and angry with no nuance, blaming everything on the ex, completely lacking the subtleties of “On My Own” where the narrator is feeling guilty about ruining his relationship and sad that it didn’t work out.
The other dark and heavy songs, “Someone Who Cares”, “Goin’ Down” and “Bully”, are a lot better. “Someone” is a moody, melancholic song, with a very angry and powerful bridge, all about complete loneliness. If you don’t find the chorus too angsty and over-the-top (“Why is it hard to find someone who cares about you, when it’s easy enough to find someone who looks down on you?”), you’ll definitely feel it in your soul. You might even relate it to some of your favorite characters. “Bully” tries to say something, telling stories about characters who were bullied and got revenge on their tormentors. Its commentary doesn’t go any deeper than “Blame the family, blame the bully”, but the song has an angry edge, and it’s refreshing to hear a son on this album that’s not about the narrator and his relationship problems. “Goin’ Down” is also very different from the typical Three days Grace song, with its sort of upbeat but trippy feel and darkly comedic lyrics about killing the guy who tried to kill you or something. Just like “The Open Door”, the best songs are the ones where they go out of their comfort zone.
This album wasn’t completely awful but revisiting it was not fun. Again, it’s similar to “The Open Door” in the sense that it was the one of the first underwhelming albums I heard by a band that made one of my favorite albums, and strangely enough, it has the same contradictory flaws. It’s heavier and at the same time it’s too clean, like a technically perfect but personality-free copy of its predecessor. It tries to be poppier and fails, and yet the best songs are the ones that break away from the formula, because it feels like they can’t do a good formula track anymore. Some songs are enjoyable if you listen to them individually, but listening to the whole album can be a draining experience. Some bad albums are just lesser entries into an artist’s discography, and some like “Life Starts Now” or “The Open Door” do a level of damage to their artists’ career that they never really recover from. Not because they literally ended their career, but because anything they released after that can be praised with “at least it’s not this”. That’s why I consider “Life Starts Now” to be a disappointment even if it’s not the worst thing ever.
