Review Summary: Fallenmania, part 26
Could today’s album embody every fallenmaniac cliché you can think of? It’s named after a lyric from “Bring me to Life” and it’s by a Christian band, except they’re a Finnish symphonic metal band rather than an American alternative metal band. And honestly, if you’d like to hear a mix of Evanescence, Nightwish and The Letter Black, it’s a pretty good offering.
From the beginning, this album is very symphonic and very religious. After a prayer-like a capella intro, we get bombastic orchestration, energetic riff and nice choir in “God Has all Glory”. Johanna Aaltonen even sounds like every symphonic metal singer, or almost: a nice, not always lyrical soprano voice. The song is pretty catchy, and well performed, it’s kind of a shame that it doesn’t have anything more interesting to say than the usual religious stuff.
It's a running theme throughout the album: good instrumentations, with religious lyrics that get repetitive quickly. I don’t like saying that, but it’s really the kind of album where you can feel free to ignore the lyrics completely, and just focus on the music. Thankfully, the music is actually pretty good. Well, most of the time. “Holy Secret” is a ballad that goes on forever, with the choir and the flute as its only interesting elements. But the rest is more entertaining.
“It Is Time” has a great distorted riff that sounds both like a Going Under riff and a power/symphonic riff, a pretty good guitar solo too, a very catchy melody and an edgier performance from Johanna where she sings with a deeper voice, and a great part where she sings with the choir. “Be Aware” has the choir singing the chorus, and some nice violin and piano parts, with “Going” riffs under them. “Ambition” is a pure symphonic metal track, with heavy riffs and a powerful feel.
The title track starts as a ballad and becomes livelier on the chorus, with Going Under riffs, obviously. Johanna’s deeper voice shows more emotion than her usually too smooth high-pitched singing she tends to use. I guess it can be considered the “Bring Me to Life” of the album, except it’s more obviously religious, rather than being so vague it could be interpreted as such. “Years Go By” is another ballad-turning-to-rock, with a piano and distorted riffs. It sounds like too many other songs on the album, but for once, the lyrics are interesting, trying to tell a story rather than preaching. However, most of the album, especially on later tracks like “Way”, turns into a mess of dull ballads and preachiness, including an actual sermon.
This is what happens when you mix “Fallen”, the symphonic metal bands it’s often compared to, the Christian acts it also gets compared to, from the metal bands to the pop balladeers, and a whole lot of preachiness and lack of subtlety that even Skillet didn’t have, and Evanescence certainly didn’t. It’s a monster created from all the trends in mainstream metal and Christian music. More seriously, I’m torn on this album. I’m torn between feeling disgusted by the preachiness and repetitiveness and feeling some admiration for the album’s really good symphonic metal sound, how it alternates between the symphonic metal, alternative metal and pop sides of Fallenmania. Musically, it’s definitely more interesting and better-performed than a lot of Flyleaf and The Letter Black’s output.
HB is also one of the most prolific, long-lived bands I’ve reviewed in this series. That could be because Christian audiences never give up on their bands, but also because there was a real demand for a symphonic/Christian/Fallenmaniac band, all the trends coming together. Or it could be because this album is good, it has some very dull parts but its highlights are really good. As usual, I find both good and bad things to say about a Fallenmaniac album. That’s just an example of my conflicted feelings on this whole trend, how it both entertains and disappoints me. And as I said, this is an album that embodies nearly every Fallenmaniac cliché. So maybe I need to review some completely different albums next time, or albums with a slightly different kind of Fallenmania.
