Review Summary: "In all matters of opinion, our adversaries are insane."
Remember when
Skillet would write with both the secular and religious audience in mind so they could actually bring people together? Even at their absolute nadirs to most people, such as
Dominion, they at least
tried to appear somewhat "inclusive", or at least, as inclusive as a band like this could get. So when "Unpopular" dropped with politically-charged lyrics, it would've been blindsiding had John Cooper not shown flashes of his descent into insanity, and unfortunately, that was not just a one-off; his madness is seeping into the music itself, and it really shows (and not for the better). Despite that,
Revolution does have some of its good parts, because maybe, hopefully, I would like to believe, that Jen Ledger, Seth Morrison and John's wife Korey Cooper tempered some of his crazy f**king songwriting decisions.
"Showtime" is the band's best opener in
years, and features all the hallmarks of a classic Skillet track with some minor electronic undertones; it would be absolutely perfect for a WWE theme song, should they be open to licensing their music to wrestling promotions again, especially with lines such as "Heart of a lion is roaring in my soul", "Make my mark, no apologies / A day in the life, a revolutionary", and "Tonight's the night we make history / You gotta fight to take victory". Unfortunately, we don't even get anything else before "Unpopular" causes everything to fly off the f**king rails; Jon Cooper rages about how sane people don't like his recent d**k-sucking of Trump by ranting about how he thinks "today's a good day to be unpopular", and he embarrassingly tries to
rap and it's the most cringe moment that has ever come out of this band, while "All That Matters" mixes some transphobic bulls**t with some trap influence and then some more insane rambling about how they're taking bibles away from people and all that other conspiratorial garbage. Jen Ledger is noticeably downplayed compared to the band's other releases, as if she's become terrified of John now that he's
utterly lost his goddamn mind.
The sad part about
Revolution is that it's still insanely catchy. The title track is anthemic and goddamn infectious, in the vein of "The Resistance" off of 2016's
Unleashed. The final pre-release single "Ash In The Wind" is also downright catchy, albeit quite generic, while "Happy Wedding Day (Alex's Song)" is a surprisingly poignant acoustic track that would be genuinely perfect for any wedding. What really kills the album as a whole is Jon's unashamedly massive ego and the lack of Ledger's vocals; her drumming is as fierce as ever, but outside of "Showtime" and "Fire Inside Of Me", she's criminally underused in every single aspect, especially in songs like "Unpopular" that could have benefitted enormously from her singing. But you can tell that Jon has been infected by the anti-woke mind virus crap with such beautiful lines like "A kid arrested in the town / He read the verses too loud / But burn the cities down, celebs will bail you out" and "I can't make sense of this / So just leave the kids alone / Better not break into this home" and that's in "All That Matters" alone, with "Unpopular" being the other big offender of it, alongside the fact that Jon still thinks he can rap. Korey and Seth's guitar lines can carry most of it as well, despite being bog-standard and the tone in "Death Defier" sounding like it was dunked inside of a toilet before being wiped on Kanye West's unholy asshole.
The production is literally just mid. It's just the same old radio rock production. Nothing stands out, yes it's super compressed and all that jazz, but the true downfall of
Revolution is John Cooper, and given that he's falling even further into insanity as of this writing with gems in interviews such as "if you don't believe in God, then you don't believe in any sort of almost like eternal consequences to the way you live your life", then it's just about time to get off the SS Skillet before we reach the "Hitler wasn't
that bad, actually" island. Tracks like "Showtime" and "Happy Wedding Day" are some of the good scraps here you should take as a bittersweet reminder as to how good they once were, and are the reason this barely,
barely gets a 2.5 rating. But you should just take those and run the f**k away.
