Breaking Benjamin - Dear Agony
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CD Details
Artist: Breaking BenjaminEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown)
CD Release Date: 2009-09-29
Music Label: Hollywood Records
Soundtracks:
- Fade Away
- I Will Not Bow
- Crawl
- Dear Agony
- Lights Out
- What Lies Beneath
- Without You
- Give Me A Sign
- Hopeless
- Into The Nothing
- Anthem Of The Angels
Music reviews of Dear Agony
Music Review: I honestly didn't think they'd be able to top Phobia. But maybe they have.
Rating: 5 Stars
Breaking Benjamin, Dear Agony (Hollywood, 2009)
I've been a huge Breaking Benjamin fan pretty much from the first time I heard "So Cold." (This may surprise folks who know my usual listening tastes, which run more to noise and powerelectronics, but let's face it--can you name any other current rock band who explores the same themes as all my favorite PE acts, and then can get them into the American Top 40? Of course not. None others exist.) But, you know, they've always been your basic common-time guitar-wall rock band. So when the verse kicked in on "Fade Away", the first song on Breaking Benjamin's fourth album, Dear Agony, I started wondering if I had a bad copy. And then it happened again in the second verse, and I realized that Breaking Benjamin were... syncopating. Seriously. Honest to god. Granted, fans of more complex rock bands (think Rush/Tool/3/any band who's ever released a rock and roll song using a time signature like 9/8) probably wouldn't even notice. But for your basic four-on-the-floor rock and roll band, that half-note jog Burnley does with the vocals halfway through each verse of "Fade Away" is a quantum jump. I wonder what album #5 will eventually sound like?
They head back into their standard sound after that, and I'm not going to complain about that one little bit; Phobia was one of my favorite albums of 2006. While my first seven or eight spins of the disc have only produced one song that grabbed me by the cojones the way that "Evil Angel" and "Unknown Soldier" did the first time I heard Phobia (that, by the way, being "Crawl"), the album as a whole feels more coherent than anything BB have come up with to date. I really didn't think they could outdo Phobia for simple, straightforward songwriting and We Are Not Alone for the almost gleeful perversity of Burnley's lyrics ("I brought you to life just to hear you scream" is one of those lines that make me wonder why anyone who doesn't enjoy powerelectronics has discovered these guys), but this is it. Who was the last rock band to release four great albums in a row? (Upon reflection, while writing the rest of this, I did come up with one--Pre-Black-Album Metallica.) Especially four albums in the same vein; the consistency of the band's style is such that, for the most part, you can stick a song from Dear Agony next to a song from Saturate and play them both for a newb. Ask him which one's newer. You'll get a confused look. Usually I hate that sort of thing in a band (the only other exception I can think of right now is Legendary Pink Dots), but Breaking Benjamin's sound was good enough from the start that they've got a long way to go before wearing it out, I think.
I always find myself amused by the bands I get listed as "similar artists" when a BB song comes up on last.fm, or the "buy this with..." box on Amazon. Calling, say, Hinder in any way similar to Breaking Benjamin makes me wonder what the guys who stick this stuff together are smoking when they do it. You could make a case that the aggressive, kinda-nu-metal guitar-based BB sound is similar to something like Three Days Grace (but, really, can anyone explain the supposed similarity between Breaking Benajmin--or, for that matter, Three Days Grace--and some sort of wannabe-alt-country act like Hinder or Three Doors Down?), but the big difference is in those lyrics I mentioned before. While Three Days Grace are off whining about failed relationships, Breaking Benjamin are giving you helpful solutions to failed relationships like offing your ex ("The Diary of Jane") or making sure she's dead before you start courting her ("So Cold", "Breakdown"). I haven't yet dug deep enough into "Crawl" to decide whether you can add "construct your own" to that list, but given the band's involvement in the recent movie Surrogates, it's probably not too much of a stretch. Another difference is that when Burnley isn't giving you novel solutions to your girlfriend problems, he's making sure you know those are the only ones that are workable. Lyrics about relationships that actually exist are, for the most part, anything from relentlessly nihilistic (Phobia's "You Fight Me") to perverse-but-not-as-bad-as-murder ("What Lies Beneath"). There is one kind of distressing exception to this rule, which comes at the very end of this disc ("Without You"). I call it "distressing" only because, well, look what happened to Staind when Aaron Lewis found himself a stable relationship. I took one listen to their most recent album (only because it was supposed to be a "back to the roots" kinda gig) and promptly ate it. That's not easy to do with a CD...
In any case, if you're already a Breaking Benjamin fan, you probably don't need my recommendation to go out and buy this thing, preferably today (it gets released to the general public on the day I write this--and given what times my local Best Buys and the like open, you can probably get it about eight minutes from when I'm writing these words, at 9:52AM). It's just as good as Phobia. It may even be better. I do think that people who haven't discovered the band yet, as always, would probably do better with a less coherent album with more tracks that sound tailor-made for radio play (which could be either We Are Not Alone or Phobia, both are wonderful), but make Dear Agony your second Breaking Benjamin purchase. Once again, just as in 2004 and 2006, Breaking Benjamin will probably not top my albums of the year list (it's gonna be hard to get by Merzbow's incredible Don't Steal My Goat album), but it would take some of my favorite bands releasing the best albums of their career to knock it out of the top three. **** ½
Description of Dear Agony
2009 release from the American Alt-Rock band. Features the single 'I WIll Not Bow'. Breaking Benjamin has toured with the cream of the Rock crop: Nickelback, Korn, Evanescence, Three Days Grace, Seether and Three Doors Down.Hard Rock & Metal CDs
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