Ember (studio album) by Breaking Benjamin

From Bi11LL26Y 04/27/2018 03:36

Wasn't a huge fan of this album. Every song sounded just about the same. Would be some good background music, but not very good as an album. Ironically the first and last track (especially the last) was better than the rest of the album.

I like this album, it is decent, and I am a fan of the band, but there are a few things that really hold it back. This album would be a lot better if it weren’t for the obnoxious high pitched screaming effect the band seems to be obsessed with. The screams are drowning in effects and it takes away from the power of the album. They use this effect in almost every song. I prefer the songs where they don’t have it, like the dry screaming from Dark Before Dawn. Which brings me to the vocal layering. Every singing line sounds highly edited and totally saturated by compression, pitch correction, reverb, delay, and completely unnecessary harmonies. A lot of the times, a raw vocal line is more expressive and sounds better. This is a freakin’ hard rock band, you don’t need to perfectly tune and harmonize every singing line, you should just use the harmonies to add expression, and considering almost every vocal line is harmonized it greatly takes away from the effect of it, and becomes annoying.

I also have a gripe with the lyrical content of the album. The band would really benefit if they got away from the same lyrics they have used for pretty much every album. How many times is he going to sing about, “breaking,” “shaking,” or “fading?” It would be hilarious to make a word cloud of this band’s lyrics. The band would benefit from exploring new lyrical territory.

Finally, the album’s first few songs suffers the overuse of the Phrygian Harmonic Major scale. It’s like Ben is obsessed with the sound of a flat 2 and 6 in a major key. He can’t get away from it. It’s because of this that I prefer the second half of the album, where they seem to break away from the monotony of basically the same overused chord progressions. Finally, the entire album sounds heavily processed, which I would assume is what they were going for. It’s just not my cup of tea. I’d like to reiterate that I somewhat enjoy the album, however I can’t help but make fun of or laugh at the ridiculous sounding screams, over-the-top processing, and the typically lame lyrical content.