The Groove Music Life

One band that my fiancee and I have witnessed a couple of times in concert was Evanesence, a band that we had found some common ground on early in our relationship. By the time we had witnessed the band live – once during their co-headlining stint on the 2007 Family Values Tour, later that year during their own headlining tour. But it wasn’t the same Evanescence that had recorded their breakthrough album Fallen or even their 2006 studio follow-up The Open Door. A year into touring behind Fallen, band co-founder and main composer Ben Moody left the group abruptly; weeks before Ev began their FVT stint, lead singer Amy Lee fired guitarist John LeCompt, leading drummer Rocky Gray to leave himself in disgust. While The Open Door was a decent album, the succeeding post-LeCompt/Gray tour was Evanesence in name only – it was really the Amy Lee Show, and the second of the two shows we witnessed that year was more memorable for Lee’s rather ridiculous stage outfit (which resembled a huge red Swiffer) than for the performance itself.

Since his departure, Moody busied himself with a variety of songwriting and producing jobs, while LeCompt and Gray collaborated in a band called Machina. That was until last Thursday when a USA Today article revealed that the three former Ev’s had reconvened with former American Idle (sorry, that’s how I always spell it here at TGML) contestant Carly Smithson. To make a long story short, a few rehearsals later, the new band – initially called just The Fallen until another band with that name cried fowl the day after the USA Today article decided to hit the ground running with a game plan meant to both satisfy hardcore fans of the collective’s previous projects and build/maintain interest in the band itself – a gradual releasing of recorded material every few weeks, interspersed with touring and eventually to a release of a physical album with some material not previously issued online.

The demand for the band’s first single proved to be overwheling to the band – so much so that copies of the mp3 single didn’t start to come out until Tuesday afternoon, almost 24 hours after the band opened up their site for signups.

Is it worth the wait and the hype? Yep. Comparisons to Fallen-era Evanescence are tempting to do, hard to avoid, and more than justified. After all, given that 3/5 of this band was also 3/5 of Evanescence when that band’s aforementioned breakthrough album was recorded and toured behind, it should be no surprise that We Are The Fallen sounds like that era of Ev. The reuniting of Moody with LeCompt and Gray reinforces who the actual creative force behind Evanescence was (Amy Lee’s version of the band on The Open Door notwithstanding), and Carly Smithson proves to be a more full-bodied vocalist with a wider range than Ms. Lee. To sum it up: Past recorded accomplishments notwithstanding, this is how Evanescence should have sounded in the first fucking place.