Review Summary: And now, I guess, this is as good as it gets ...
Picture this: you’re at another snobby wine tasting event with your elitist friends (that’s what kids do these days, right?) As the evening’s festivities progress, a wine tasting challenge is offered to you. Blindfolded, three crystal glasses half filled from three separate bottles are set before you. Your task is to distinguish between each accurately.
You try the first ... hmmm, bold flavour, progressive undertones and a pleasant aftertaste. That’s got to be a 2004
Collide, perhaps the best outing from the Skillet vineyard. Lifting the next glass to your lips, you sample a similarly tasting instance of the first, although slightly sweeter to perhaps entice the younger, soft drink swilling generation. A forcibly added zest of grandeur lingers on your tongue, but despite its faults, you still like it. 2006’s
Comatose, to be sure.
Two for two so far. You grip the last glass between your thumb and forefinger, cradling the bulbous shape against your palm. Swishing it around in your mouth, you quickly conclude that it’s a cheap, somewhat degenerate knockoff of the
Comatose brand. To your dismay, it’s the new duplicate 2009
Awake.
There’s nothing here on Skillet’s latest that wasn’t on their predecessor
Comatose, and that in itself is disheartening. Although not the most ambitious, progressive group out there today, Skillet have nonetheless evolved on each album from the humble beginnings of their self titled and
Hey You, I Love Your Soul to the energetic
Collide and daring orchestral scores from
Comatose.
Awake does nothing to further that evolution that has influenced each record from the Christian rock band.
That doesn’t make it bad, however. Some moments on the track, such as the powerful chorus in “Hero” (sans the soaring violins that made the songs “Collide”, “Rebirthing” and “Comatose” stand out from the mainstream) are catchy and inspire sing-along’s. Their sound hasn’t decayed, so those who were happy with the development of
Comatose will no doubt lap this up enthusiastically and brand me stupid for giving it the rating I have.
But what reason is there to listen to this? Even “Don’t Wake Me”, the third track on the record, has a suspiciously familiar ring to “Yours to Hold”, which shares the same order on
Comatose. The majority of the second half of the album runs together, causing the cliché, unimaginative lyrics and song names the only reason you can tell individual songs apart. It’s like looking at a row of septuplets and trying to identify each one.
And what happened to the orchestra?
Again, like I said earlier,
Awake is not a bad album. If you liked their last effort, by all means, get it. It’s major folly is that it just sits still, and because of its close proximity to
Comatose, it’s stale. As John Cooper sings in “Don’t Wake Me,” “and now, I guess, this is as good as it gets.”
