Until I heard
Fallen by
Evanescence, I’d thought that
“goth-metal” (for want of a better name) was a purely European
phenomenon. Now, it seems, America and Britain might be sitting up and
paying attention. Evanescence, though, aren’t an obvious choice to
champion goth-metal’s assault on the mainstream: Amy Lee, the band’s
singer, definitely has the requisite beautiful voice, but unfortunately
the songs don’t do it justice. Indeed, the extremely polished production
fails to obscure the lack of structure and imagination displayed by most
of the tracks. Too often, the likes of
The Gathering and
Lacuna Coil have done it
before, and done it better. When they’re good, however, as on “My
Immortal”, Evanescence are extremely affecting.
In any case, I hope that the sudden mainstream success of Evanescence’s album and the single “Bring Me To Life” in the American and British charts presages a general increase in the popularity of this subgenre. It’d be great to hear things that aren’t rubbish on the radio!
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I can't stand the shouty bits either - Lacuna Coil and even Theatre of Tragedy do the dual male/female vocals thing much better. And you're right, she is gorgeous:
By the way, I'd recommend Nighttime Birds by The Gathering if you want to hear something similar but with possibly even nicer vocals, no shouty bits, and much better music. It's become one of my favourite albums over the last year or so. There are some deeply strange "opera metal" bands like After Forever around too. |
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Update: The excellent acoustic version of "Bring Me To Life" has now been added to the BBC site here. But it's Real Player format (Damn the BBC) so I can't listen to it - firewall isues. I'm not sure if its available for Amigas either :o( |
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Fortunately, I have a Win98 PC on the LAN and the next desk over. (And I'd have a Linux PC too if I could be bothered finding space for it.) |
I really dislike the shouty bits within "Bring Me to Life", far too Linkin Bizkit. There was an excellent acoustic version (of it) on the Live Lounge segment of Jo Whiley's BBC Radio 1 Show - sadly not yet available in the archives. It proved a great showcase for Amy's voice, but not as good as some of the album art/promo pictures do for her(?) face... Pretty pale girls with dark eye make-up mmmMMmmm!
Still not quite my cup of tea though.