Review Summary: Fallenmania, Part 37
Let’s look at a special fallenmaniac album, its most recent, heaviest, most creative and best received, or maybe just the best. Spiritbox is one of those interesting, unclassifiable bands, created by former members of Iwrestledabearonce but influenced in equal parts by Meshuggah and Evanescence. That’s what their music reminds me of, but of course, it’s so much more than that.
They share Evanescence’s love of references to the sea and to emotional suffering, and Meshuggah’s love of heavy and dark riffs, as you can hear on their second album titled “Tsunami Sea” and its great opening, “Fata Morgana”. It begins with some of their most relentlessly heavy riffs and loud screams followed by melancholic, ethereal singing, a pure expression of pain, rage and sorrow. “Black Rainbow” uses a similar mix of vocal styles, with twisty, djenty riffs.
Once again, the fallenmaniac influences become more obvious after a few tracks, especially on the melancholic singing on “Perfect Soul”, where Courtney Laplante sounds like Amy Lee with a slightly deeper voice. It’s softer than the songs that came before, and some may think it breaks the album’s rhythm, but I’d say this one and “Fata Morgana” simply show the two extremes of the album’s styles, so to speak. Other tracks are more in between those extremes, such as “Keep Sweet” and its mix of Amy Lee-esque singing with screaming and djent riffs similar to “Black Rainbow”. Or “Soft Spine”, which Courtney dedicated to “everyone I hate” and its ethereal intro followed by energetic djent riffs and furious screams. That one really gets you pumped up, just like the weird industrial djent of “ No Loss, No Love”.
The title track may be one of the best example of the band’s fusion of styles, with its djent riffs, Amy soundalike vocals, references to the sea and to drowning in your unpleasant emotions, even with some background sounds of waves rushing. “A Haven with Two Faces” uses similar lyrical references, and a mix of dream-like singing with djent riffs, suddenly turning into raspier and shriller screams. As with many other tracks, Courtney proves she’s like Jens Kidman, Maria Brink and Amy Lee rolled into one.
This is even more obvious with her tormented singing on “Ride the Wave” alternated with enraged screaming, and on the last track, “Deep End”, which includes some of her best singing, while the band plays that kind of powerful riffs that a lot of other acts use when they want to make us think of the vast ocean. That’s this album in a nutshell: the sea, melancholy, hopes and pained rage.
Once again, you wouldn’t think that clean, sad singing would work with djent riffs, and fifteen years ago that would have been unthinkable, just like it would have been unthinkable to mix Evanescence with heavier, newer styles, or to even claim influence from Eva while playing a much heavier kind of music and hoping to have any kind of credibility. But Spiritbox make it work, they have some great vocals and some very interesting riffs, they’re good at heavy tracks and more atmospheric ones. They have their own style that feels like a mix of its varied influences.
While the 2010s had a few acts that reminded me of Evanescence but wouldn’t have claimed it, the 2020s are producing a new wave of fallenmaniacs proudly admitting their influence and taking it into new directions, ranging from Halsey’s weird pop to Illumishade’s symphonic metal and now Spiritbox’s progressive oceanic djent. I find that new wave pretty interesting, and I’m glad that people are finally acknowledging Evanescence’s influence on the so-called female-fronted rock and metal scene. That’s why I wanted to prove with this series. The fallenmaniacs may not have always been successful or even good, some didn’t do much more than copying Evanescence right down to their riffs and singing styles, and some managed to take what was good about the Fallen style and bring it to new directions. They were there, and they will exist in some form for a very long time, just like Evanescence themselves. There were and will be so many of them in fact that I could spend my entire life researching and reviewing them, but even the best projects have to end some day. So consider this review to be the happy conclusion to the fallenmania series, happy because we’re lucky to have Spiritbox. That doesn’t necessarily mean the end of my Evanescence-related reviews, but for now, I’m moving on to other things, probably a series on other kinds of imitators.
