Review Summary: Seether's living the same damn life.
Seether was always a band that I never really liked nor hated. They were just your average post-grunge band that would end up on the radio a few times a day. Sure they had their good songs and their bad ones, yet with every single song that Seether puts out, it turns out to be something you’ve heard over a thousand times before. The riffs, drumming, lyrics, even the vocals aren’t anything to write home about. There’s nothing really special about them, and after their latest release,
Isolate and Medicate, they might never stand out amongst everyone else.
To give them credit, this record has Seether at their most melodic and emotional. Songs like ‘Words as Weapons’ and ‘Save Today’ do end up having a deep feeling, as if they actually performed with passion, and that is something that Seether rarely does. And despite ripping off every melodic line from your typical ballad (listen to Devour the Day’s ‘Move On’ for a perfect example), ‘Words as Weapons’ actually works in its own right as it’s vocal mixture with the instrumentation fits together quite nicely. The same thing goes for ‘Save Today’ which is the best song on the record, as it brings the emotion to a much larger extent, but whether or not Seether is at their full potential here is still in question. Other songs like ‘See You at the Bottom’ and ‘My Disaster’ rely on its catchiness to pull the listeners in, and while the clichéd lyrics may feel cringe-worthy, the overall performances of both songs are actually decent for the most part.
But with that said, the most serious crime that
Isolate and Medicate commits is that the rest of the record represents Seether as themselves yet again. What I mean is that it doesn’t break any barriers for the post-grunge genre. ‘Suffer it All’ and ‘Keep the Dogs At Bay’ are what you’d expect from a band like Seether. Typical heavy riffs, clichéd lyrics about how the world and life are such horrible things, Chad Kroeger style vocals, and you know what, it’s boring. We’ve heard it done a thousand times before and we want something different. Instead we end up hearing a complete carbon copy of Nickelback’s ‘How You Remind me’ with ‘Nobody Praying for Me’ and other such predictable pieces that just aren’t memorable enough to satisfy.
All in all,
Isolate and Meditate just ends up being nothing more than another Seether album. Sure some songs may have them trying different things for the band, but if you compare this to almost every other post-grunge songs that’s out on the radio, then nobody is really going to find this as some groundbreaking achievement that will change the face of radio rock forever. True, the fans might enjoy this for the next couple of years until the next record shows up, but the rest of us will just glance at this and move on. And unless Seether creates something that will certainly standout above the rest of the crowd, then that’s what going to happen for the rest of the band’s existence.
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