 |
Three Days Graces current line-up |
Hey, welcome to another one of my blog posts, where as usual, I'm doing another album review now, and today, if you couldn't tell by the title, we're going to review the album One-X, made by the band Three Days Grace, a Canadian alternative rock band that was formed in 1997. However, originally, the band was named Groundswell when it was really first formed in 1992 with this title, but the band broke up in late 1995 for unknown reasons. Then the band regrouped in 1997 with their current name, Three Days Grace, and with a line up of Adam Gontier on guitar and vocals, drummer and backing vocalist Neil Sanderson, and a bassist with the name of Brad Walst. This line-up through their entire 15 year career, has only gone through one major change, which was recruiting a lead guitarist with the name of Barry Stock in 2003, but let's go back a little before then shall we? The original trio that made up the band once met up with local producer Gavin Brown in Toronto. The band gave Brown several years of material ever since regrouping, and he picked out what he called 'the golden nuggets', according to Gontier. The band and Brown cleaned up the songs and polished them into a demo album which they then sent to EMI Music Publishing Canada. The label wanted to hear more material, so with Brown producing, created what would become the bands first single, "I Hate Everything About You". It attracted the interest of several record labels, and eventually, the band was signed to Jive Records after being sought out by the companies president. Once on Jive Records, the band made their eponymous deput album, and to support it, released their deput single which I mentioned earlier in this review, "I Hate Everything About You", which was being labelled as their breakout hit. After recruiting lead guitarist Barry Scott, the band went on tour continuously and extensively for nearly two years in support of this deput. The band also released two more singles from the album, which were "Home" and "Just Like You", but around this time, lead singer Adam Gontier developed an addiction to the prescription painkiller, OxyContin. After the bands tour ended, they knew they couldn't go on with Gontier's condition, so in 2005, with the support of friends, family, and his fellow band members, Gontier checked himself into the CAMH (Centre for Addiction and Mental Help). Gontier being in depression during his time in rehabilitation, decided to begin writing lyrics for songs about how he felt, and what he went through in the CAMH. Once he had successfully completed treatment, the band unanimously agreed that peace and tranquillity would be necessary to complete work on their sophomore album, which would come to be known as the album I'm going to review today, One-X. The album was released during June of 2006 and met mostly positive reviews from critics, one of them being community website Ultimate Guitar. What do I think of the album though? Well, let's get started on finding that out shall we?
Ok, I'm going to make something clear at the beginning of this review of musical quality. I actually
REALLY ENJOY THIS ALBUM, however, there are some faults that I can find with it, most of them relating to the major flaw of this album. It can get really bland and boring at times. There isn't really anything about the album that makes it stand out for years and years to come, unless you're maybe a fan of the group. Most of the songs just follow a typical verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus format. It isn't really anything new and never been done before. Another thing that's just boring and bland about the album is how mediocre the guitar solos are, at least when there are any. For example, in the first track of the album It's All Over, the song is just starting to build up to the guitar solo at what I think is the end of the second chorus, and you're hoping for something awesome, and you just get this mediocre slowish solo, which to me, is a total disappointment seeing as that's one of my favourite tracks on the album. Looking past these flaws though, the musical quality of these songs is still pretty high in my opinion, so I'm going to give it a 3/4 in musical quality.
Next up, we have the lyrical quality, and it was pretty much just what I was expecting, and what was I expecting? Lot's of repetition. I get that this albums lyrics was written by someone who had just come out of rehab, but he could have tried some more topics other then just the typical, "I hate what I've become stuff", and because of this repetition, this albums lyrical quality again suffers from being bland and boring after a while. Again though, the lyrical quality is still pretty good, so I'm just going to give it a 2/3.
Lastly, we get to how well all of the songs fit together, and I don't think anyone will be surpised by this, but they fit very well together. This is probably caused by the fact that most of these songs are about the same thing, but if its broken, don't fix it right? So this category definetely gets a 3/3.
So let's get to the final verdict shall we? So we have a 3/4 in musical quality, a 2/3 in lyrical quality, and a 3/3 in how well the songs fit together. In total, this adds up to an 8/10, which means this album is a pretty good album. The only reason this album suffers is that its really repeditive and can get boring some times, however, this doesn't make the album bad. It is a really awesome collection of tracks, repeditiveness and all, and maybe that repeditiveness made the tracks fit better together, I don't know. My point is tht if you're a Three Days Grace fan, or just a modern rock or metal fan in general, go grab this album, it is a pretty good buy despite the repetition, and that's it! I'll see you guys later!
P.S. Sorry this review took a while, procrastination issues that I have to deal with. Anyways, now it's really the end, bye!
You don't seem to like this album very much. Let's see. You think it's boring, repetitive, lacking instrumentaly and lacks any sort of diversity. Sounds like a 5 or a 6 to me.
ReplyDelete