Suicidal desperation isn’t exactly a prescription for pop success. But there it was, in the chorus of the song everyone at the sold-out Congress Theatre was waiting for Wednesday.
“Save me from the nothing I’ve become,” wailed Evanescence singer Amy Lee, from the hit “Bring Me to Life.” The song turns despair into a lighter-waving stadium anthem, and it propelled the quintet’s debut album, “Fallen,” to nearly 4 million in sales. It also helped Evanescence swipe the best new artist Grammy a few weeks ago from the prohibitive favorite, thug-rapper 50 Cent.
“Bring Me to Life” puts a commercially winning twist on a played-out sound. With staccato guitar chords emerging from a mist of trickling piano lines, and Lee crying like a 15th Century damsel locked away in a medieval fortress, “Bring Me to Life” spices the bland heaviness of modern-rock staples such as Linkin Park and Creed with a touch of Gothic mysticism.
Though Evanescence strives to identify itself as a band, it is less so than ever these days. Co-founder, guitarist and songwriter Ben Moody, who described Lee as his “best friend” in the liner notes to “Fallen,” quit in midtour last year and left the band scrambling for a replacement.
Backstage at the Grammys, he and Lee met the press separately, and Moody said he and Lee had become “two entirely different people.”
But Evanescence rolled on with barely a hitch, and now it’s Lee’s band more than ever.
On an album, she may play a Prozac princess, but onstage she’s a whirling Arkansas waif backed by four anonymous musicians, including Moody’s replacement, guitarist Terry Balsamo.
The singer brings a dose of much-needed estrogen and sensuality to mainstream hard rock. She also flirts with religious imagery and the kind of moody, eye-liner-heavy melodrama that elevated the Cure into an arena act. Evanescence sounds as if it’s headed in the same direction with a sound that’s just slightly off-kilter enough to seem fresh, without really saying much of anything beyond “I tried to kill the pain, but only brought more.”
At the piano, Lee murmured precious confessionals that placed her at death’s door and pleaded for deliverance. But the ripe lyrics–“These wounds won’t seem to heal/This pain is just too real”–turned her melancholy mood into maudlin cliche.
In rock mode, she swished her jet-black hair and pumped her fist like a triumphant aerobics instructor, her buoyancy rebuffing the doleful lyrics.
Lee’s voice projected well above the band, which labored mightily but produced only a bass-heavy mulch that sounded absolutely turgid in the cavernous belly of the acoustically challenged theater.
The arrangements all led to the same place: windswept angst giving way to heavy-handed choruses. The musicians were augmented by backing tapes that added acoustic guitars, keyboards and madrigal choruses.
Combined with a light show that could’ve illuminated O’Hare International Airport, this was a show designed to bludgeon more than seduce.
But the only lasting impression was made by Lee’s voice, with its piercing, crying tone and a range that enabled her to knock the stuffing out of high notes most singers can only dream about reaching.
Despite Lee’s enthusiasm, nothing more was at stake than a routine run-through of every song from “Fallen,” and only “Tourniquet” distinguished itself as a worthy successor to “Bring Me to Life.”
The sole surprises in this otherwise routine night at the corporate-rock trough were covers of Soundgarden’s “Jesus Christ Pose” and the Smashing Pumpkins’ “Zero,” both apparently chosen for their religious overtones.
The quintet has balked at being labeled a Christian band, even though religious images riddle its lyrics. Evanescence also dabbles in the gloomy obsession of Goth-rock. But it doesn’t explore either area with much conviction, instead preferring to remain studiously vague.
In the hands of more skilled artists, such a stance might come off as mysterious. Evanescence, in contrast, leaves the overriding impression of a band not really sure of what it stands for or what it wants to say other than, “Life could be better.”
What it undeniably has is a charismatic singer and focal point in Lee. But unless she develops a few more songs on the order of “Bring Me to Life,” she’ll just be the latest in a long line of one-hit wonders to win a best new artist Grammy and fade away.
Openers DeFault came off like the latest in a long line of Creed clones, delivering their originals with stentorian humorlessness and flattening songs by Jeff Buckley and Led Zeppelin beneath their bulldozer dynamics.
