Review Summary: Fallenmania, maybe?
This album only has a tiny connection to the Fallenmania series, as we’ll discuss later. It’s not really a pop version of Fallen, it’s more like a typical early 2010s pop album, with some vague attempts at being dark and edgy. But whatever you could compare this album to, I have to review it, because I just had to talk about such a confusing album.
The most fallenmaniac tracks on the album would be its closer and opener. “Coming Home Part 2”, a sort of melancholic ballad that sounds a lot like an Evanescence or Within Temptation without guitars. “Back from the Dead” is a good example of the album’s pop sound with a dark edge I can’t quite call fallenmaniac, with its piano and drums, melancholic singing and lyrics about love and death. Whatever else I can say about that album, at least, this song has an extremely catchy chorus, and Skylar Grey is a pretty good singer, with some emotional intensity to her voice.
Those are the two best songs. There are a few other good songs, but also a lot of bad ones as we’ll see. For now, the good ones. “Religion” is another dramatic love song which starts like a folk ballad before introducing percussions (kind of the same beat as many other songs on the album), and the very Fallen-esque lyrics about a couple being each other’s only support during dark times. The edgy, dark vibe of the album is put the best use in “Final Warning”, another piano-and-percussion track with a sing-songy melody and lyrics about killing an abusive partner.
At least, this song is about something, and actually creates some atmosphere. It’s a lot better and more memorable than her other attempts at being edgy, like a lot of generic, bland songs I’ll describe later, but mostly, the extremely embarrassing “Ticking Time Bomb”, about how she keeps silent, but really she’s about to explode. That isn’t the worst part: that’s when she says “I know you won’t understand me like the Unabomber would” and “explode, explode, exploding”.
Now, we are really getting into the problems with the album. I’d say the album is at its best when it’s going for a darker edge, which is why “C’m on Let Me Ride” feels so out of place. It’s a far more upbeat song, with the same beat as 95% of the album, with a bunch of biking-related innuendoes and an embarrassing guest verse from Eminem. I could talk for hours about everything wrong with that song.
Not that the edgier songs are necessarily better. “Sunshine” has, of course, the same beat as its predecessors and pretty much the same topic as “Religion”. It sounds OK, but kind of generic. “Glow in the Dark” has a similar problem, it just sounds like one of the hundreds of pop songs from the same era, so generic they completely blend in the background. Basically, with “Sunshine”, the album becomes a bunch of similar-sounding, generic songs, all about being broke and miserable. It’s good that she’s talking about those issues, I guess, but this is getting really repetitive. At least, “Clear Blue Sky” has some nice “yeah yeah yeah” background vocals and a chorus that immediately gets stuck in your head. Skylar seems at least a little self-aware, considering lyrics like “Take away my emo” and “It’s making my world all grey”.
And that’s the album in a nutshell. It sounds good and it’s trying its best to say something, to have its own identity. It has some pretty solid songs. But it has enormous flaws, with its repetitiveness, genericness and forced edginess. I’m not sure what I can get from this, except some early 2010s nostalgia and only a few good songs. And “C’m on Let Me Ride”, if you want a song with a hundred things wrong with it, that still gets stuck in your head. I liked the album more on a second listen, but I could never say I loved it. Overall, it was a pretty mediocre first impression, which is why Skylar Grey’s career never really took off. She kept making music, but without much success, a sadly common fate for many fallenmaniacs.
So now, let’s talk about where this fits into the Fallenmania series. Like I said, its only connection to Fallen is a vaguely dark and edgy tone, Skylar Grey’s dramatic vocals and ethereal stage name, plus the fact she was introduced to the mainstream audience singing “I need a doctor, to bring me back to life” on a Dr Dre song, with a video where she definitely tried to look like Amy Lee in the “Bring me to Life” video, and also singing with Mike Shinoda on Fort Minor’s “Where D’You Go”. So, in the mainstream audience's eyes, she kind of was a pop Evanescence. This is a smaller phenomenon, very different from the alternative/gothic metal bands usually reviewed in this series, but it’s still worth looking into. After all, “Fallen” managed to make dark, depressing music mainstream-friendly, so it’s not really surprising that we’d have a few pop versions of it during the 2000s. However, in the 2010s, with Evanescence’s glory days behind them, their imitators became more subtle. You might think every pop or rock album with a darker edge owes a little something to “Fallen”, or maybe you won’t hear it. That’s how you know an album had a huge influence on pop culture, when it has blatant imitators and some subtle influence on completely unrelated albums. Is this series going to cover more pop albums with only a faint Fallen influence, along with other goth/alt metal bands? Of course.
