Let's be honest: Seether showed some big potential with Disclaimer and Karma & Effect. They were one of the few modern rock bands in the US that you could listen to without feeling you were putting trash in your ears. In a scene with bands like Three Days Grace, Nickelback and all that cookie-cutter rockers, Seether were the kings... in the good sense.
But for some reason, they radically changed their sound. Blame the label, blame the band or blame a scene where every band seems to repeat over and over the same patterns in every song they put out. The thing is, Seether became to sound too much generic. Great lyrics? Not anymore. Amazing vocal melodies? They faded out (like a photograph, maybe) and were replaced with lazy verses and choruses.
There is no doubt in that Finding Beauty in Negative Spaces was a big departure from the "Seether sound" and showed the band doing their best Three Days Grace's impression. And for some reasons, we all knew it was not casual.
Almost four years later, Seether has put out another album. Were we all right? Absolutely.
In Holding Onto Strings Better Left to Fray, Morgan and co. do not look back at their roots. That would be nice and interesting if they were releasing better songs than the ones that appeared in Disclaimer and Karma & Effect. Sadly, this is not the case. What we all have (again) is a compilation of songs that, musically, do not show a significative improvement.
In their sophomore album (if we do not count Fragile as their first and we forget about Disclaimer II), they expanded their style to something more complex and deep. I guess the man behind that improvement was Pat Callaghan. In Holding... Shaun Morgan delivers his best lyrics ever, but there is something lacking in the production and the instrumentation.
Sincerely, I just do not know what happened to the guitars. Take a look back and remember the crushing guitar riffs in Remedy, Simplest Mistake or I'm The One. Those guitars sounded heavy, powerful, you could feel them slapping your face. In Holding Onto Strings... we have distorted guitars, but they do not sound powerful at all. In fact, they sound too compressed, too harmless.
Fur Cue is a great opening track, but the distortion sounds weak. The same goes for Desire for Need, which must be one of the most inoffensive songs in the album "thanks" to its lame production.
Instead of a crushing, good distortion, we have a lot of layered, overproduced vocals that do not help us to take the songs seriously.
Lots of "Hey" "Oh" or other random, useless lines that sound too forced. My God, if only they put all this work in the instrumentation...
But if I give the album a 3 you can imagine I like some of it, right?
In fact, songs like Fur Cue and Desire for Need, have nice vocal melodies. The whole album is very melodic, and there are some songs that feel very enjoyable. Here and Now, Master of Disaster, Down, Dead Seeds, Yeah... It is not a bad album, but it shares defects with FBINS.
The biggest letdowns in my opinion are Fade Out (with a verse that leads you to think the chorus will be HUGE and then a cookie-cutter, generic chorus hits you in the face) and Roses. In fact, I think that this track needs a whole paragraph because it has to be one of the worst songs Seether has put out since... forever.
The intro is cool, diferent. Then you have some unimaginative guitars, but the verses help you to think the song is not that bad. But finally, you hear the chorus. And if you are not brave enough, you will probably forget about the album for the rest of your life.
Yeah, just exaggerating a bit but... It really shows how Seether has changed for the worst. Do you want an example?
[Save ME/Even as you break ME/Every time you rape ME/Leave me coming all undone/Praise ME/Turn your back and hate ME/Every time you waste ME/Keep me underneath your thumb]
It is not just the overuse of the same words (break, rape, waste...) but all those lazy rhymes. Me, me, me... I have no other word to describe it but rubbish. To not mention that the melody is something the Backstreet Boys could have danced on back in their youth. Try it and imagine them dancing on Roses' chorus and have a good laugh!
If you are a Seether fan, be awared that you will not find another Disclaimer nor another Karma & Effect. The songwriting is good, and I am sure that with another kind of production or mixing, the results would have been better. What I can't understand is that if they are a rock band, why does the album sound so harmless? Why the distortion is watered down by lots of layered vocals? Why a lot of the melodies sound too forced, like trying to sound the most radio-friendly possible?
The sad thing is that they can do better.
Outstanding tracks:
· Master of Disaster
· Dead Seeds
· Yeah
· Here and Now
