When Evanescence were starting out, they faced scepticism from US rock radio stations for having a sound based around female vocals and keyboards, or “a chick and a piano” in the enlightened language of the rock jocks. Their record label wanted them to add a male vocalist to the mix. But the Arkansas group, led by singer Amy Lee, stuck to their guns and were vindicated. Their debut album, 2003’s Fallen, sold 17m copies worldwide — one of the biggest-selling releases of the century.
Fallen’s style was nu-metal, a sub-genre that horrified heavy metal purists in the 1990s and 2000s by melding metal with hip-hop, grunge and emo. Evanescence brought a different tone to it. Their songs mixed gothic piano-pop with the video-game convulsions of nu-metal. Lee’s powerful voice rang out at the centre of the jump-cut riffs and endless climaxes, a rock-operatic mezzo-soprano hollering about pain, death and salvation. Religious imagery pointed to links with the Christian rock scene, although Evanescence repudiated it. They didn’t want to be seen as a Christian band.
What sort of band were they instead? Since Fallen, Lee and her bandmates have struggled for the answer. There have been long gaps between releases and extensive line-up changes. The Bitter Truth is their first set of new songs since 2011’s Evanescence. Their last album, 2017’s Synthesis, chiefly consisted of orchestral reworkings of old songs, inspired by Lee’s work writing film soundtracks. It was the kind of project that makers of multi-platinum records are allowed to pursue while their record labels wait with gritted teeth for the next proper album.
In that respect, The Bitter Truth fulfils expectations. It returns Evanescence to a bombastic hard-rock and metal mode. Like Muse, whose influence is detectible in the supple electronic bassline of “Yeah Right”, they strike a balance between pomp and catchiness. The choppy agitation of their nu-metal days has been replaced by a fuller sound.
Lee’s powerhouse voice is as ear-catching as ever. “Wasted on You” finds her in full power-ballad form, doing a big vocal number about being trapped in a relationship. In “Yeah Right”, she goes from arena-sized cries to a concluding passage of Billie Eilish-style whisper-singing. But the actual lyrics are hard to make out. She seems to have been mixed into the music so as not to overwhelm its arrangements, which has the side effect of making the words semi-comprehensible.
Strong feelings of anger and despair recur, but their phrasing, when decipherable, is generic. “I’m back at the edge now,” Lee sings in “Far from Heaven”. “There is no way back now,” she announces in “Broken Pieces Shine”. Only during “Use My Voice” does the rote language of struggle and uplift acquire genuine force, with Lee issuing a clarion call for voting rights with a guest team of fellow female vocalists.
Saying as little as possible as loudly as possible is a familiar trick in arena rock. Evanescence do it effectively on The Bitter Truth. The 12 tracks are cohesively organised but lacking in character. Whatever individual edge lifted the band above the rest when they began has faded away. The results provide a coherent but ordinary response to the question of what type of band Evanescence have become — a big formulaic rock act.
★★☆☆☆
‘The Bitter Truth’ is released by BMG
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March 26, 2021 at 07:00PM
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