Friday, October 14, 2011

Evanescence shows change of pace on new record

Debuting with its album “Fallen” in March of 2003, Evanescence was off to what seemed like a strong start. Containing songs such as the hit “Bring Me To Life” the album was sure to set the band skyrocketing to success in the world of rock music. However, since 2006, the group has not released any new studio albums – until now.

The band’s newly released self-titled album is exactly what listeners expect to hear. The band prides itself on its rock and metal sound, and that is exactly what listeners are given with this album.

The album opens with the new popular single “What You Want.” The song is an instant blast into the band’s hopes for the future of the album and opens with a bang. Fans will surely be happy to hear singer Amy Lee and her vocals back in action, especially with alleged rumors of the band having a new lead singer. No need to fear, Lee is still Evanescence’s main woman. Carly Smithson, who was thought to be the new lead singer of the band, replacing Lee, is in fact in a band of her own. The confusion between the two was due not only to their similar looks, but also to the fact that Smithson’s band mates are actually former members of Evanescence as well.

Overall, Evanescence has stayed true to its originally intended style of a mix of rock metal and pop. This album, however, differs from the band’s first, in the sense that the album is actually a little more upbeat and “fun,” as Lee stated in an interview with Spin Magazine. If audiences can recall, the band’s first album – “Fallen” – can be described as anything but fun, filled with depressing, emotional lyrics and hard rock melodies, with a few melodramatic piano ballads tossed in between. As much as fans seemed to have enjoyed the past album, the band has seemed to want to take a new spin on things. Unlike “Fallen,” this self-titled album is what seems to be the band’s way of starting new, while keeping a little bit of what made the group what it is. The album does not have as many piano ballads as the band’s debut – one of the only ones being “Lost in Paradise,” which seems to be a growing favorite among listeners. Most of the songs are fast tempo and stick mainly to the rock style. In a way, the band’s sound seems to have changed its style, in the sense that the music is more of fast-paced rock songs rather than the typical piano ballad by  Lee –  always dealing with love, death or some other emotional issue. The lyrics and song titles are less gothic than previously and while the lyrics still tend to deal mostly with the darker side of love and life in general, the album’s overall tone is much less depressing than “Fallen.”

The new self-titled album can be described mostly as an explosion of emotion, possibly a reaction of the band’s pent up energy from its break in productivity. The album is nothing short of 12 songs, (16 in the deluxe version) filled with Lee’s vocals pounding away with the strong guitars and drumming. Possibly what made the band so highly noted upon its first debut, Lee’s vocals are most definitely one of the most known and favored aspects of the band. This being one of the reasons this new album will have so much success with its fans. Lee is possibly one of the defining aspects of this album – her vocals powering through each and every song, evoking deep emotion while providing great amounts of entertainment to listeners. Her voice matches the mood and feel of the band’s style perfectly. Low and rich, Lee’s vocals are really what make Evanescence such a distinguishable band, and there is no doubt it will do the same on this new album.

Evanescence fans everywhere finally have something to be excited about with the new release of the self-titled album. Released on Oct. 11, 2011, the album can be purchased on iTunes in two versions: original and deluxe. For fans that just can’t get enough, the deluxe version contains four bonus tracks, giving a total of 16 tracks altogether. Unlike some bonus tracks, which may stray from the album’s overall collective sound, the bonus tracks featured on the deluxe version will not disappoint fans who may be looking for a little something extra. “Secret Door,” already growing in popularity, gives fans a taste of Lee’s slower piano ballad, which they proved to love upon the band’s release of “Immortal” from its first album. Other bonus tracks include “New Way To Bleed,” “Say You Will” and “Disappear,” which all flow with the album’s overall theme of faster-paced rock songs. The comeback album is sure to please fans who have been patiently waiting for the band’s return.

Source: dailycollegian.com

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Review: All Music

3 1/2 out of 5 stars

Difficult births are no stranger to Evanescence. Nothing ever quite seems to come easy for Amy Lee, yet the five years separating Evanescence’s 2006 sophomore effort The Open Door and its eponymous 2011 album were relatively quiet, the band undergoing some lineup changes -- not to mention a switch of producers, from Steve Lillywhite to Nick Raskulinecz -- but nothing comparable to the messy departure of Ben Moody between the group’s first two albums. Such comparative calm is reflected within the grooves of Evanescence, which is less tortured tonally even if it remains quite dramatic. Lee’s default mode is to sing to the rafters, her operatic bluster sometimes overbearing when her settings are gloomy, but Raskulinecz pulls off a nifty trick of brightening the murk, retaining all of the churning drama but lessening the oppression by brightening the colors and pushing the melody. While there’s hardly a danger of Amy Lee removing her thick mascara, she’s not pouting all the time; there’s some shade and light here, some variety of tempos, enough to give Evanescence the illusion of warmth, not to mention a fair share of crossover hooks. It’s aural candy for aging goths and tortured tweens alike.

Source: allmusic.com

Evanescence Finds A Good Place

Arkansas goth rocker Amy Lee had a smile in her voice when she described the scene outside her window at a concert stop in San Juan, Puerto Rico, last week.

Blue skies, warm breezes and the bluest ocean. Paradise.

"I'm hitting the beach as soon as we're done here," she said.

After years of tumult with her band Evanescence - a bad break with longtime friend and co-founder Ben Moody in 2003 and a revolving door of lineup changes in the years since - Lee is finally in a good place.

"This is the strongest lineup we've ever had. Will (Hunt) is the most amazing drummer in the world. He brings insane amount of punch to the band. I remember when he first joined it was like everything just jumped into 3-D all of a sudden," Lee said, then lavished praise on other band members.

"I guess part of this whole thing right now is we all like each other," she said, which was not the case for much of the band's early years.

Despite selling 17 million copies worldwide of their 2003 debut album "Fallen" and winning a pair of Grammys for the effort the following year, Lee and Evanescence were very much a dysfunctional family.

Even after Moody's abrupt departure midway through a European tour in 2003, the band struggled to regain its footing. The departure, ironically, led the band to pull out of its 2003 Tucson show with KFMA's Butter Ball - the second Tucson no-show for the band that year. The KFMA show was to have launched the band's U.S. tour.

On Tuesday, Evanescence released its third album, "Evanescence," a project that Lee believes puts the band back on track creatively.

"I definitely feel a great sense of teamwork, togetherness. We're in this thing together," the 29-year-old classically-trained pianist says. "I would never want to say that we weren't good before. We made a lot of amazing music. But we are in a place right now that is very significant. We wouldn't be calling the album 'Evanescence' if I wasn't ready to put that stamp in time."

The record comes five years after Evanescence's experimental multiplatinum sophomore album "The Open Door," an album Lee said was almost too dark. That's saying a lot for a woman who has built her reputation on solid goth credentials, from her often handmade Victorian-style clothing to her streaked black hair and tatts.

" 'Open Door' was, I think, very heavy, but also very dark and moody and almost slow and drudging in its heaviness," she said. "('Evanescence') has got a lot of energy. I think part of these songs with that energy and that speed and that intensity comes from working with the band and jamming together and working with the drummer sitting there. I think that the band really has a new tightness. I think all those things push it to a more energetic level."

The album's first single, "What You Want," already has gone to radio, where it was inching its way into Billboard's Top 10 on the rock charts. It was at No. 15 this week.

"I think the first single is a good representation. The music is dynamic. It's all over the place. When you get into it, you're going to hear the deep tracks. There's the epic heart-breaking moments and some things that I think are classics for this band in a way, but just stronger," she added.

Evanescence recorded the album in Nashville, Tenn., at Martina and John McBride's Blackbird Studio, which Lee said also contributed to its softer attitude.

"It felt like we were off the grid a little bit," Lee said of the six months the band spent in Music City, living in an apartment together and riding into the studio every day. "It felt like we could really just create. It made for a little bit of an escape, honestly."

Lee said she will play several cuts off the album alongside the band's early hits - including "Where Will You Go," "Imaginary," So Close," "Understanding," "Bring Me To Life," "Going Under" - at their long-awaited Tucson debut concert Saturday at Casino del Sol's AVA. The show will pay passing nods to the band's past as it introduces fans to its future.

"We just have fun out there. We get out there and leave it on the stage," Lee said. "There's a lot of energy in our show. It's the album on the next level."
Source: azstarnet.com

‘Heavier’ Evanescence has a different edge

Amy Lee is a harp nerd. Or at least one in training.

“I’m a nerd in that I own and play the harp,” the Evanescence frontwoman says, laughing. “I think that’s enough.”

Adding to her instrumental repertoire is only one of many musical changes on the goth-tinged alt-rock band’s new self-titled album.

Lee, Evanescence’s sole remaining original member from the band’s 2003 breakthrough debut Fallen, has added more edge, synthesizers and programming to the rock mix, making “an even heavier version of Evanescence.” The singer had to learn “really hard” piano parts for the band’s just-launched U.S. tour that runs through Nov. 1 before heading to Europe.

“I always want to do something that’s bigger and better and more interesting than before,” Lee says “I guess partially, that’s just for my own indulgence. The vocals are higher and the piano parts are more complicated. So I’m doing my best! It’s like playing a harder level of a video game.”

Many of Evanescence’s fans have remained loyal to the group over the years, and Lee hears a lot from them on Twitter. What remains to be seen is how this new album will sell compared with the previous two.
Released when Lee was just 22, Fallen sold a healthy 17 million copies worldwide, buoyed by the hit single Bring Me to Life and two Grammy Awards, including best new artist. But Evanescence’s 2006 sophomore effort, The Open Door, sold only 6 million. All the while, Lee weathered a bandmate merry-go-round, the key loss being the resignation of fellow founding member and childhood friend Ben Moody.

Moody, who left the band after its debut album, released a solo effort in 2009 and founded We Are the Fallen with American Idol finalist Carly Smithson and two former Evanescence members. The current Evanescence lineup includes ex-Cold guitarist Terry Balsamo (who has been with the band since Moody’s departure), rhythm guitarist Troy McLawhorn, bassist Tim McCord and drummer Will Hunt.

Lee acknowledges struggling with the attention from media and fans. “It’s different than real life. You have to be really careful and sometimes it feels like you just can’t ever be alone. And other times, it feels like you can only be alone in a weird way.”

With her 30th birthday approaching in December, Lee looks back now with a healthy sense of humor, and even jokes about using dry ice, fan-powered wind whipping through her hair and “Michael Jackson smoke” in her new shows.

“You’re still figuring out who you are at that point, so I did a little bit of growing up in front of everybody, which is fine. I’m great with it now,” Lee says of the band’s early days in the spotlight. “I needed to be an adult without being onstage — I needed to just be Amy and not the lead singer of Evanescence for a little while, and want this and do this because I couldn’t help it and because I had music that I was so in love with that I couldn’t stand not to share with the whole world.”

Lee began working on new songs after Open Door, first just for fun and later deciding to turn them into a proper record. Some were acoustic and Neil Young-inspired, and then she moved into an electronic phase. On the new album, the song Swimming Home came out of that tinkering with ambience and different sounds and feelings, she says, while Made of Stone was a fully electronic song that Lee turned into a “big, rocking Evanescence song.”

Her personal life was changing in that time, too. Lee married Josh Hartzler, a New York therapist and “awesome dude,” in 2007, and she also started taking harp lessons on a lark. Lee liked it so much, she began using the instrument in her songwriting and played it on the new record.

“It is not easy,” she says. “I had a little head start because I could play the piano and they’re in the same family. It’s cool to have something different, though, when you’re writing. A different instrument will make you write a different way.”

Raised in Arkansas, Lee studied music theory and composition at Middle Tennessee State University before leaving to focus on Evanescence, but she’s maintained a love for learning, which crosses over into passions such as painting, cooking and being a harp master.

OK, well maybe not a master. “My instructor is incredible. I’m like a level 2 — she’s like a level 10,” Lee says.

“When I’m writing music, I like to sit at the piano and put my fingers on the keys and not think. Even though it’s difficult to execute perfectly, there’s still some cool freedom in just rocking the harp without a lot of thought going into it.”

Evanescence at the Palladium: Concert Review

The Bottom Line:Singer Amy Lee's commanding vocals had the audience at attention, but only partly engaged.

It wasn't a sold out performance at the Hollywood Palladium on Tuesday night, but for a band that hasn't released an album in five years, Evanescence drew a more than respectable crowd to the famed art deco venue, a staple of L.A.'s Sunset Blvd. since 1940.

In a way, the audience, like Evanescence's music, was hard to categorize. Among the sea of people straining for a glimpse of singer Amy Lee and bobbing toward the front of the stage were twenty-something punks with green hair, middle-aged men with moustaches and long ponytails, bleach-blonde ladies and pitch-black goths.

With that in mind, any attempt to generalize the night would be an exercise in futility, unless, of course, you're talking about opener Taylor Momsen of The Pretty Reckless. True to her eyebrow-raising form, the former Gossip Girl star paired raccoon eyes with provocative fish-nets, knee-high leather boots and an all black mini-dress, although surprisingly, for the earlier part of the evening, she covered up with an oversized flannel and black leather jacket, before peeling off the layers and writhing around on stage.
Momson has made plenty of headlines over the past year for her stage antics, but she kept it relatively tame for the Los Angeles audience, dropping a few F-bombs, but more importantly, delivering a slew of songs with power and conviction behind a gravelly voice that sounds like it belongs to an artist well beyond her 18 years. In return, the actress-turned-singer received a variety of adoring obscenities hurled from the audience -- to one, she responded, “I think you’re fucking sexy, too.”

Cheering Momson on was Gossip Girl co-star Connor Paolo (aka Eric Van Der Woodesen), who shouted words of encouragement from the VIP balcony then bolted before the headliner hit the stage. The Pretty Reckless set included a cover of Audioslave’s “Like a Stone," which received mixed reaction.
Evanescence took position promptly at 10:05, kicking off their set with "What You Want," the first single off their brand new self-titled album, which happened to drop on the same night as the show. Donning a black tanktop, black tulle skirt and red flannel embellishment around her waist, Lee then sauntered across the stage leading into "Going Under," from 2003's Fallen, to deafening applause.

But while Lee's hypnotizing voice sounded remarkably similar to her recordings, she bantered so little -- which is to say, hardly at all, unless it involved announcing the name of a new track or plugging the band's just-released album -- that it soon started to feel less like a concert experience and more like a singalong with the iPod on Evanescence shuffle and extra-loud.

Still, Lee delivered with high energy and an undeniably fierce vocal style, best demonstrated on the gut-wrenching ballads “My Heart is Broken,” “Lithium” and the night's closer, “My Immortal,” where she sat at a piano placed front and center. Leading into “Heart,” Lee even made a rare joke, telling the fans to be quiet so she could concentrate.

But at times throughout the band's set, the at attention audience seemed only partly engaged. With several cell phones and even some actual lighters in the air, about half of the crowd obliged to the singer’s requests for sing-a-longs. To their credit, that half gave it their all.

Set List:
What You Want
Going Under
The Other Side
Weight of the World
The Change
Made of Stone
Lost in Paradise
My Heart is Broken
Lithium
Sick
Oceans
Sober
Imaginary
Bring Me to Life
Encore:
Never Go Back
Your Star
My Immortal

Source: hollywoodreporter.com

Evanescence and Rihanna set to top the UK charts this weekend

Arkansas rockers' comeback album is currently heading for the top spot.

Evanescence are currently on course to go straight in at Number One with their new, self-titled album on Sunday (October 16).

The Arkansas rockers, who last released an album in 2006, are presently holding off competition from Steps in the race for the top spot. The reunited pop band are at Number Two with their new compilation 'The Ultimate Collection'.

Source: nme.com

Evanescence album promising but lacks depth

Evanescence makes a strong comeback with their new self-titled album, surprising fans with a more upbeat attitude.

"What you Want," is a perfect showcase of the fun and catchy made-for-radio sound that can be heard throughout the album. Though it is unusual for a band like Evanescence to sound so sunny, they successfully capture the mood without sounding unnatural or betray­ing the expectations of their fan base.
While this lighthearted attitude is enjoy­able, the album fails to capture the wide range of emotions expressed in their previous album, "The Open Door" and, instead is so intent on keeping it upbeat,that the band loses itself. It can even be said that the album is a little too cheerful at times—there are a few songs that are entirely forgettable due to their lack of passion.

The one song that should be the most pas­sionate falls flat. "My Heart is Broken," with its cliché title lyrics, completely misses the mark despite starting in the right direction. For a song that should convey deep emotional pain, it is not nearly melancholy enough. "Erase This" is equally forgettable, but for different reasons, such as being too fast-paced and too passionless to draw interest.

Though there are a few songs that fail to please, the album, as a whole, is a de­light to listen to. Fans will fall in love with "Lost in Paradise," "The Change," "Never Go Back" and "Made of Stone." "Sick" pro­vides a nice respite from the fun with its edgy, angry sound and the contrast of the hopeful and the macabre in "The Other Side" is a breath of fresh air.

"Swimming Home" is perhaps the most captivating song on the entire album. Curious in its striking difference from the other songs, it can only be described as unique. Though the vocals are unde­niably lead singer Amy Lee's, the lyrics are so strange and the sound is so eerily alien that it demands attention and defies comparison. The creepy atmosphere that it creates is so impressive that it cannot be missed.
"Evanescence" was released on Tuesday and is available in stores and on iTunes.

Source: thesetonian.com