Review Summary: Fallenmania, Part 17
You might be surprised to see In This Moment in this series, as their first album is pure mid-2000s metalcore. But I want to change things up, with albums that owe a little something to Fallen while still being completely different. I know what this album’s pseudo-goth title, its loud angst and melancholy, its ethereal intro called “Whispers of October”, even its cover with the singer made-up as a broken doll, remind me of. This is basically Fallen redone as a metalcore album. It gives us an interesting look at In This Moment’s progression and the evolution of trends in the metal scene, but we’ll discuss that later. Now let’s talk about a very interesting album that has also been in the background of my teenage years.
After an intro with whispers and ethereal sounds, we kick things off with the immediately recognizable, punchy metalcore riff of “Prayers” and its loud screams. Then it alternates between Maria Brink’s loud, strong singing and ear-piercing screams, saying something about how “This medication can’t save me!”, “I wanted to believe in all of this”, except she pronounces it as “buh-lieve”. More importantly, she sings “Take my hand, show me the way and never bring me back here”, with tons of angst and torment.
Most songs are in a similar style as “Prayers”. “Ashes” is a heavy and apocalyptic track, where Maria screams, speak-sings frantically and whispers with melancholy, ending the track with “Ashes to ashes, we all fall down”. “Daddy’s Falling Angel”, the song that makes me fall in love with this album, probably with In This Moment in general, is possibly their loudest and most emotional song. Maria is singing and screaming about her father who abused and abandoned her as a child, expressing all the pain and rage she feels because of his betrayal, all to hide her desperate need for the familial connection she’s lost. Everything from this song, especially the bridge (I’m drowning in solitude… Again! Forgive you, why? No this won’t kill me!”), is etched into my memory.
For something completely different, the title track is possibly the most Fallenmaniac, with its sort of melancholic melody, and again, tons of misery, described as a “beautiful tragedy crashing into me”. Beautiful tragedy is a good description for Maria’s voice, because of its expressivity, but also because her clean singing often has a sort of deep, loud braying tone that I could never really get used to. It’s the polar opposite from her screaming, which sounds just like that, someone screaming as shrilly as they can, like a lot of hardcore punk vocalists, showing metalcore’s roots. I wouldn’t consider her my favorite vocalist, and yet, her voice has such a distinctive, instantly recognizable sound that I can’t really imagine In This Moment without it.
That’s not to say her singing never sounds good. Her higher, more delicate notes sound nice, and the other ballad, the symphonic-metal-turning-into-metalcore “Legacy of Odio”, is pretty sweet too. For more of that, there’s “This Moment”, which is basically a power ballad with metalcore riff and background screams. Again, the emotion and wistfulness on this song are immediately clear.
But the best example of the album’s darkly romantic tone (in any possible meaning of the word romantic) would be the super-heavy and yet sad “Next Life”, where Maria is too messed-up to be with her lover, so they should just wait until they die and are reincarnated together in a better life. The verses have some of her best screams (but the very best is the really long one at the end) and the chorus, where she sweetly sings “I’ll be waiting, waiting for you, meet me in the next life”, is another great addition. “He Said Eternity” has a similar mix of heaviness and melancholy, and lyrics about love helping you through your darkest hour.
The last two tracks are yet more angsty ballads with some screaming, nothing we haven’t heard before, but I don’t really mind considering the really good songs that came before them. This is an album I had overlooked, but I’m enjoying it more and more, yes, even despite my bad jokes about Maria’s singing, even if I put it in the Fallenmania series. Something about the album’s angst, confessional lyrics with sort of mythological or poetic metaphors really appeals to me. Maybe because I interpret it as “metalcore Fallen”, or maybe it’s a style I just enjoy.
Again, this series isn’t about bashing albums for being like “Fallen”, it’s also about praising albums that have some of what I liked about “Fallen”. This album’s mixture of metalcore and gothic metal (in its loosest definition) is also fairly interesting. It’s a style they retained on their second album, “The Dream”, but of the 2, “Beautiful Tragedy” is by far the most interesting and best-written. Afterwards, In This Moment’s career would go on all sorts of weird directions, that sort of reflect the evolution of metalcore, and of mainstream metal in general. At first, if you had a woman fronting a metal band, and that band wanted mainstream success, they had to sound a little like Evanescence or Within Temptation. In This Moment was unique because they had a heavier, almost more experimental take on Fallenmania. And just like that, they brought a young audience towards heavier stuff, shifting trends away from Fallenmania. Fallenmania often feels like a trend that quickly disappeared, with short-lived bands and others that only stuck around by abandoning that sound. But in truth, Fallenmania never dies, it only takes different forms.
