Review Summary: Fallenmania, part 20
The story of Kelly Clarkson’s “My December” has become a part of pop music legend. It’s an album she wrote almost all by herself, and she had to fight her label to be allowed to release it, but it flopped anyway, due to its darker tone. It’s also her most Fallenmaniac album, with its angsty, angry rock sound and Evanescence-inspired visuals. To this day, it seems to be her most divisive album, the only one that people on this site seem to either love or hate, with not much in between. As often, I have more of an “in between” opinion on it.
For the most part, “My December” is a pretty solid rock album. “One Minute” has a catchy riff with some nice distortion effects. Kelly’s singing, going from low to high, and the background vocals, are a nice touch as well. “Judas” has a catchy riff, some nice high notes, and some of the angriest lyrics about feeling betrayed. “Yeah” is much more upbeat than a lot of the album, with an infectiously catchy riff and great high notes on the chorus. “Hole” has an even better riff, played by Mike Watt from Firehose, and some pretty good drumming as well. With the darker tone in Kelly’s voice and its angsty chorus about how “There’s a hole inside of me”, this song is basically this album in a nutshell. Those songs are not necessarily the greatest you’ll ever hear, but they’re definitely enjoyable.
The most obviously Fallenmaniac track would be “Haunted”, which even shares a title with a song from Fallen. It has everything: the dark electro sounds, the distorted riffs, haunting backing vocals, and the desperate “Where are you? I need you!” chorus. It’s also one of Kelly’s best vocal performances, where she does the fallenmaniac style of singing really well, but also sounds completely like herself.
The ballads can be really good as well. “Be Still” is a nice fallenmaniac guitar, drums and keyboards ballad, with gorgeous vocals. “Irvine” is a sort of experimental, trippy ballad, about Kelly becoming an alcoholic because there was no divine or human love to save her during hard times. “Sober” is one of the most solid songs on here, with its melancholic tone, sad yet hopeful lyrics about defeating an addiction, beautiful guitar and violin melody, and Kelly’s passionate singing. This is the song that best fulfills the album’s promise of more mature and personal songwriting.
As far as singles go, this one is certainly more solid than the others, “Never Again” and “Don’t Waste Your Time”. “Don’t waste” has a pretty cool video that looks like the one from “Call Me When You’re Sober”, but it tries really hard to be so angsty and dark, with lyrics like “Don’t waste your time trying to fix me” and “Friends, what does that even mean?”. Contrary to “Sober”, the angst feels a little forced. “Never Again” is even worse in that regard. Its very first line, which also the very first lyric you hear on this album, is “I hope the ring you gave to her turns her finger green”. That’s so over-the-top and petty, and so weird coming from Kelly Clarkson, that it made a disastrous first impression. It doesn’t help that something about the song feels clumsy and not well-written. It changes too quickly from one melody to another, it feels like a bunch of different songs put together, in a bad way, and the chorus is full of sentences that feel oddly long and awkward like “It was you who chose to end it like you did”. No wonder the album flopped, with that single to introduce it.
And yet, something about the “Never again will I kiss you, never again will I love you, never again will I love to” bridge always gets to me. “Don’t Waste Your Time” has a catchy riff and a pretty nice melody, that’s why I can’t even really call it a bad song. Similarly, “Maybe” is an acoustic guitar ballad about how she’s so chaotic and “confusing as hell”, but she needs your love. Again there’s so much forced angst, but Kelly and co are good enough songwriters and performers to make the song sound pretty good. And its lyrics are probably something we’ve all thought about ourselves at some point.
Those are my confusing as hell thoughts about this album in general: it’s trying so hard to be dark and angsty, and many times, it fails. It also doesn’t feel as memorable as “Breakaway”, it feels longer and less enjoyable to listen to. And yet, a lot of the songs have some pretty good ideas, I can’t really consider any of them bad, no, not even “Never Again”. But many of the songs are actually good. When this album is good, it’s very enjoyable, very emotional and honest. Once again, Kelly proves that she’s a very good songwriter, she can make you feel for her in a few words. Her singing does the same. Once again, it’s amazing all she can do with her voice, and I’d say she sounds even better than on “Breakaway”.
She also makes a pretty credible rock singer, if you like angsty and vaguely fallenmaniac rock. But this album proved to be too dark for mainstream audiences, and “Never Again” gave the wrong impression of this album, how good it could be in some places. So she went back to being a talented but ordinary pop singer, with no traces of the Fallenmania that made up the most interesting part of her career. Her fallenmaniac sound made her a more credible artist for a short time in her career, but she had to ditch that sound if she wanted her career to keep going. Once again, this proves that for many artists, Fallenmania was no way to sustain a career, but it can give us some pretty good albums.
