Review Summary: Tedious and Boring, 3 Doors Down's self-titled album consistently fails to keep listeners entertained.
3 Doors Down- 3 Doors Down
Oh how the semi-mighty have fallen. Remember "Kryptonite" and its ridiculous music video? Well, that used to be one of my favorite songs of all time and one of the best mainstream rock songs. Think about it, Brad Arnold's vocal were powerful, strong, and full, and the song was just a pure load of Southern Rock fun. "Kryptonite" was one of the many songs from their first and second albums that showed 3 Doors Down's potential as great artists. However, unlike some bands, instead of taking the potential the band had and putting it to use, 3 Doors Down chose to get worse as they went along. Gone are the fun anthems like "Kryptonite", gone are the the pure power and energy, replaced by a "mature" sound that continually bores..
Seventeen Days had started the decline into softer and duller songs, and this is the continuation of the decline.
Buying this album, you are given the guarantee that there are no new ideas. That hasn't been 3DD's strong point, in fact it's probably their weakest. The sound like a southern rock band, still following every cliché in the book. Now, the product sounds so over-worked out, it just doesn't work any more. Not only that, but in 3DD's attempts to make themselves sound matured, they make the sound so boring and tedious, you actually sweat from how much of a chore it is to listen to. The heaviest song is probably the first song, "Train" which, ironically, is the most tedious. Brad Arnold repeats lyrics exceedingly, repeating the line "put me on my train mama" or something along those lines 10 times or more in a song barely 3 minutes long. The instrumentation on "Train", like the lyrics, are overly irksome, with the guitars playing basic guitar licks and the drum’s just pounding along, doing nothing in particular.
Dynamics are also abolished from the album as well. Each song on the second half of the album sounds exactly alike--basic guitar power chords, boring drum work, and incredibly soft lyrics. The album is completely dominated by this formula: verse-chorus-verse-chorus, and some songs ("Train" in particular) sounds like it’s all chorus. There are no dynamics--either its all a powerful chorus that gets entirely too tedious by the time the song is halfway, or it’s all soft sounding and seems to go into the abysmal place people call nowhere. There is, however, one exception to that rule. That exception "It’s Not My Time", which shows some dynamics between verse and chorus, though not by that much, the verses sound almost as loud as the chorus, but at least it the verses don’t mesh with the chorus in sound quality.
Why do I give this a 1.5 and only like one song? Well, remember how I never mentioned the vocals? Well that’s a highlight. His vocals aren’t exactly what they used to be, he tries to sound much more mature on this record, but his vocals still sound better than most vocals of post grunge. His voice is hard to describe in complex terminology, but easy to just say he has a powerful solid clean vocal. He doesn’t, however, go out of the range of solid, southern sounding, clean vocal, but that is enough to keep this album from a 1.
3 Doors Down have attempted to make a mature effort. Unfortunately for them they succeed at being tedious, boring, and pretentious--not mature. Nothing really comes to grab me except for Brad Arnold’s vocal work. The band really could have made a good album if they tried to improve their songwriting abilities while they mature. Instead, the songwriting stalled, and the album fell flat on its face.
Recommended Songs:
"It's Not My Time"
