So, what's a critic gotta do to get himself off of a record label's mailing list? Not that I'm actively trying or anything, but you'd think that after a few years of getting a bunch of free CDs, most of which were so uninteresting to listen to that I didn't even bother to keep up my end of the bargain and write up a review, the folks at Provident Label Group would figure that this unprofessional critic wasn't worth the expense. (How did I get on their mailing list in the first place? Oh, yeah, I wanted a sneak peak at a new Jars of Clay album, and a friend hooked me up. Those were the days!) Here it is, nearly five years after I started writing up reviews of these freebies, and panning the vast majority of the ones that I actually bothered to write about, and I'm still getting a barrage of new drink coasters in the mail. Awesome.

There's one disc in particular that they seemed to really want me to review, so I'm gonna go ahead and oblige them on this one, just because they went to all the trouble of sending me a pre-release way back in December for an album due out in March, and then they sent me a final copy even though none of the audio content had changed, and I'm thinking, Dang, they really want to get the buzz going on this one. March is almost over, and I've missed the release date as usual, but if they want my opinion on Fireflight's Unbreakable that badly, then who am I to let them down? This is a band whose sophomore album they clearly expect big things from, even going so far as to promote the band's sound as "Blindside meets Evanescence".

Now let's take a moment to let that one sink in. Go hit up Amazon or All Music Guide, listen to a few audio clips, and let's see if your reaction is the same as mine. That reaction would, of course, be the following:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

No.

Now look, I'm not a rabid fan of either of those bands, and I certainly wouldn't act like they're so out of everyone's league that nobody could possibly sound by them. But Fireflight? Not remotely. The similarities to Evanescence - a band that used to rank among my favorites, but failed to provide a follow-up that justified all of the personal drama that the band had gone through - are superficial at best. Alright, so you've got a vaguely heavy rock band with a chick for a lead singer. That'll get my attention, but it ain't exactly a new concept, especially when said singer is too cheery and chirpy-sounding to convincingly mimic the melodramatic brooding of Amy Lee. (Why do Christian bands keep trying to do this, anyway? Oh, yeah. Because people are p!ssed that Evanescence doesn't want to be called a Christian band, and therefore, any band who can sound like them and be upfront about their faith at the same time is a potential cash cow.) And as for Blindside? Yeah, that one's totally out of left field. I like a few of Blindside's albums, but their approach is notably more twisted, and aggressive, and less conventional, even on their more mainstream-sounding albums. They're a Christian band who found some degree of success in the mainstream by singing about a lot of things that it's justifiable for Christians to be angry about. Fireflight's way too conventional with their melodies, their thoughts, and their instrumental skills to even know how to approach that. They sound aggressive, but they don't sound like they have much of anything to be justifiably angry about. At best, we get a lot of your typical CCM cheerleading, and a bit of a guilt trip here and there about how we don't love God the way we should. This is territory that neither of those bands would ever touch.

I've got a better comparison for Fireflight to try on for size: "Krystal Meyers meets Kutless". Because they've got that wannabe rock-chick thing down, and it's less obviously trying to imitate the pop-punk wannabe sound of Avril Lavigne than Krystal Meyers's music tends to be, but in doing so, it's also rather conventional, run-of-the-mill power chord rock, with unbelievably cliched lyrics to boot, which has the amazing side effect of making them sound like Kutless with a female lead singer. Occasionally, they can get a catchy enough riff or an anthemic enough chorus going to temporarily escape those trappings and sound like Superchic[k] - the poster child for girl-power Christian bands (and a band that I kind of enjoy). Maybe even Skillet, if I want to be really generous. And who knows, maybe they weren't aiming for more of a dark, brooding, angry sound in the first place, and it's just the PR material that screwed them over. Even so, there's still the fact that this has been done before, and by better bands. (Try Plumb, for starters.)

Oh, wait! Did I mention that a major selling point for this album was that its lead single, "Unbreakable", was featured in the pilot episode of the Bionic Woman remake?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

I'm glad to see that little cross-promotion worked out for them! (And yes, I watched that series. All eight excruciatingly idiotic episodes of it. Don't ask me why I stuck with it to the end. I'm just glad that it got cancelled, lest my morbid curiosity bring me back for another mind-numbing exercise in utter futility.)

Maybe I should just set aside my mocking of the hilariously bad advertising campaign for this album, and allow the music to speak for itself. (In other words, let's put the fish in a slightly bigger barrel, and then shoot them.)

Unbreakable
I must say that for all of this band's copycat ridiculousness, the title track that leads off the album is a pretty solid single. It's got that "action movie" sort of feel to it, and I see why people might make the Evanescence comparison here due to the hard-hitting power chords and the tough-girl attitude. Dawn Richardson's soaring vocal approach works in the context of this song's fearless attitude - she's expressing the belief that if she trusts God completely, then she can step out with confidence and not be afraid to try whatever difficult things God wants her to accomplish. The band hasn't quite figured out how to transition between the different parts of the songs, which means that it shifts gears abruptly at times - but really, this is an awful lot like Skillet with a female lead singer, and that ain't such a bad thing, though they don't quite have the unhinged edginess that some of Skillet's better songs do. It's a good song for commercial sound bytes, which is likely why it ended up getting picked for the Bionic Woman promos, even though I don't remember actually hearing it on TV.

You Gave Me a Promise
I could swear that I've heard the main guitar riff in this song somewhere before - probably in an Anberlin song or something. At least, it sounds like a simplified version of a muscular Anberlin song. That's all fine until the song arrives at a too-bright-for-its-own-good chorus that essentially reiterates the feeling from the previous song in much more inane terms: "I'll push through this moment, I'll never give up/You gave me a promise, You gave me a promise." It's repetitive enough to really suck the life out of what wants to be a solid, slamming rocker. The band takes the easy way out and speaks a lot of Christian-ese instead of really finding a powerful way to explain the experience of God's promises coming true despite difficult odds, and as a result, the song is entirely skippable.

Brand New Day
This one totally wants to be the "power ballad" that catapults forward on the Christian Hit Radio charts - you know, the mellower single from the big rock record that's got all of the strings and the basic happy melody and all that. The title alone should be enough to warn you that the lyrics are basically veering into the modern rock equivalent of trifling, teenybopper territory - if you guessed ahead of time that this "brand new day" would involve a hackneyed rhyme about the pain going away, then you win 10 brownie points! The kicker here is that the band's got a fairly catchy pop melody going here - it just doesn't fit the edgier subgenre of rock that they're trying to convince us they're good at playing. I can give them nominal points for the male background vocals and the edgier riffing during the bridge, but for the most part, this thing coasts by way too easily for it to be at all convincing. Seriously, I don't think anybody's done a good song entitled "Brand New Day" since Sting.

The Hunger
This one ranks among the few successful rockers on the album, because it's got more of an in-your-face attitude to it. Dawn manages to muster up a little more vocal attitude here, confronting a girl who seems to be always rejecting the advances of someone she says she loves - this is obviously a fairly transparent metaphor for God, but I'll give the band a pass on that one this time, simply because they play it with enough force for the sense of desperation to hit home. Still some cliches here, regarding the "hole in your soul" and all that, but this own at least shows that the band has a little promise when they lock into a tighter groove.

Stand Up
Yeesh. This one's such an obvious "battle anthem" that I can just picture Dawn running around her stage pumping her fist in the air like I've seen Evanescence do on some of their more aggressive songs. It just gives me a silly mental picture, what with the lyrics about standing up to one's demons and all that. I appreciate the message, asking hurting people in the audience to step forward proudly and not feel like they're the only ones going through pain and everyone else in the room is a nice, well-behaved super-Christian or whatever. It's stated in such a generic way that I feel like it's more about coming up with a catchy refrain (again, decent use of the male background vocals) than it is about actually explaining why these hurting souls can come forward with confidence. Good intentions, poor execution.

Forever
Duck and cover, here comes Obvious Power Ballad #2! I have to say, this one's not so bad at the outset, with its quiet guitar opening and Dawn singing from a small, isolated, dark place, but of course the band can't stand to restrain themselves for very long, so in almost no time, this bursts forward into an unimaginative chorus asking God to "Tell me You're here, and You will watch over me FOR-EVER!!!" I can sense the genuine emotion behind the cliches, so this one isn't as bad as some of the preceding tracks, but it's only really memorable in the context of that surrounding silliness. It feels like once the band comes up with a catchy melody, they just play it over and over, not knowing how else to expand upon it.

Go Ahead
There's some nice palm-muted guitar work during the verses of this song. But just when I think I'm getting into the groove of it, it takes off running into another all-too-basic chorus that finds Dawn - get this - giving God permission to go ahead and change her. "Don't let me hold You back" is what she actually says. Oh, how quaint. She actually thinks she can stop God from accomplishing something. Alright, so that's not really what she's saying - I understand the whole business about God letting a person choose and not forcing them to believe and all that - but the way it's being expressed might perhaps ascribe a bit too much power to human willpower. What does God need to do within her? What needs to be change? What tempts her to "hold back" this transformation? The song doesn't really say - it speaks in far too basic terms, making the message easier to ignore.

The Love We Had Before
While I'm getting a bit tired of the obvious power-chordage by this point (to be fair, it wears thin after you've listened to enough of Evanescence since they supposedly have a very talented guitarist and all), this song turns out to be one of the album's standouts because guitarist Justin Cox is actually singing the verses as a duet with Dawn, which plays as a sort of dialogue. It explores a relationship between two people that's been broken down by pride and a lack of communication - and yes, this time it's not an obvious "God as a boyfriend" metaphor, because both parties are admitting they screwed up and asking each other's forgiveness. It's all still a bit basic, but it contains the album's sole lyric that could be remotely considered clever: "You used to be the one I'd run to/Now I tend to run you right into the ground." And I appreciate that they didn't play this one as a schmaltzy power ballad. If they explored their sound from the angle of a band with two very different lead vocalists a little more often, they might actually get somewhere instead of sounding like a paper-thin ripoff of the obvious chick-rock suspects.

So Help Me God
Have I heard this one before? Oh yeah, I guess the lead guitar is playing a similar riff to the one used in track 2. Whatever; it's all starting to bleed together at this point anyway. This one's got another one of those song titles that I don't think any band should have the right to use if they're not going to write something more clever than the song that the title's gonna make everyone in its audience think of (in this case, dc Talk's classic from Jesus Freak), but if you ignore that, this one ain't too bad. It keeps a pretty quick pace, Justin's background vocals are once again a nice counterpoint to Dawn's during the chorus and bridge, and there's some believable sense of urgency to her cries for God to help her let go of past trauma. Yeah, the whole thing's still as non-specific and by-the-numbers as the rest of the album, but it's tolerable this time around.

Wrapped in Your Arms
You've won more than enough brownie points to win you a merit badge if you guessed that the album was going to finish off with a weepy acoustic ballad. Well, at least this final track starts that way - and I'm sorry, but as much as I like the acoustic guitar, I think it's such a cheap ploy for a band to throw in a blandly strummed acoustic chord progression when it's obvious that they've got nowhere near the skill to make the acoustic guitar interesting as they do with the electric. It's too easy of a shortcut to indicate that this is a mellow, lovey-dovey sort of song - figure out a way to create that atmosphere with the instruments you're proficient at already! I don't dislike mellow songs on rock albums, I just want to hear them performed with a little more ingenuity. Sure, this one explodes into a full-band performance rather predictably after the second chorus, but even then, it's just more power chords in that same old boring progression, as Dawn sweetly coos about God cradling her and making everything feel OK again. Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt, sold it on Ebay.

So that's it for this unremarkable album by this also-ran Christian rock band. A few promising rockers, but for the most part, you could skip this one altogether and not feel like you're truly missing anything. Unbreakable is awfully close to being altogether unbearable.

ALBUM WORTH:
Unbreakable $1
You Gave Me a Promise $0
Brand New Day $0
The Hunger $1
Stand Up $0
Forever $.50
Go Ahead $0
The Love We Had Before $1
So Help Me God $.50
Wrapped in Your Arms $0
TOTAL: $4

Band Members:
Dawn Richardson: Lead vocals
Justin Cox: Guitars, vocals
Glenn Drennen: Guitars
Wendy Drennen: Bass
Phee Shorb: Drums

Website: http://www.fireflightrock.com

Recommended: No