Review Summary: ...dead
It’s been a grueling two years for Three Days Grace. With Adam Gontier out of the picture, it became the duty of Matt Walst to fill in the lead position, only to be met with skeptics questioning whether or not Matt could capture the “passion” and “raw talent” of Gontier. That’s when ‘Painkiller’ was released to the public, welcomed by two opinions. Three Days Grace elitists immediately pushed the band aside, claiming that it’s just wasn’t the same, typing down their “I miss Adam” comments on Youtube, and weeping for the inevitable demise of a band they once loved. The others however, simply stated “It’s a Three Days Grace song,” and went on their merry way. Thus we have
Human, the first full length album featuring Matt Walst as the lead vocalist, and quite possibly the first album that even the most devoted fans didn’t care for.
Right now, Three Days Grace are suffering from a case of “Nickelback Syndrome,” the delusion that the band can still get away with the typical clichéd themes that have been told way before they even formed. How “I’m sick of running” and how “I don’t belong here” despite the fact that the band's image has been changed multiple times for better or worse. The biggest problem with this is that
Human constantly repeats the same ideas and lyrical themes over and over again, and it weighs down the entire album so much that it scrapes the bottom of the barrel. Songs like ‘Painkiller’ and ‘Human Race’ are perfect examples of this, as the choruses are constantly repeated over and over again (monotonous enough to make 'Until It's Gone' look varied) to the point where it's cringeworthy. It’s only made it worse because Matt Walst’s vocals are so laughably bad that it might give Tyler Connelly from Theory of a Deadman a run for his money.
Three Days Grace are also suffering from an identity crisis, as the production shows so well.
Human is caught between Three Days Grace’s old sound, the heavy, catchy side of the spectrum, and an “atmospheric”, electric-filled sound in an attempt to be different. What results is a confused and unfocused mess. The production is on this roller coaster ride teetering between proving that Three Days Grace is still the band that fans loved with songs like ‘Landmine’ and ‘So What’, and a band trying different ideas and a different sound that has already been taken in the first place. The atmospheric ideas that are present in ‘The Real You’ and ‘Car Crash’ are so incredibly unoriginal that it’s not so much “stepping outside their comfort zone” as it’s more like they're just finding an excuse to say “Hey look, we’ve changed our sound, that makes us better, right?” Thus a question is raised, what exactly are Three Days Grace trying to prove?
This is an album that almost everyone is going to forget even existed within the next year. There isn’t a single song on here that’s noteworthy of praise. The lyrics, the guitar riffs, and the production of each and every song on
Human are so predictable and unmemorable that they practically hand themselves over to the cutting board, waiting for the critics to chop it to pieces. Three Days Grace has been reaching towards a genre that’s been dead for years at this point. They’re out of ideas and have absolutely nowhere to turn. This isn’t what music critics are looking for, and this isn’t an album that fans are going to listen to.
Human is, put simply, a Three Days Grace album, and that itself is a felony.
