"Pieces" by Red, Friday, April 5, 2024 + End of Silence Track by Track (Repost)

I talked about my history with Red in 2021 when I talked about their single "Breathe Into Me." The band's debut album, End of Silence, starts strong before getting monotonous. Somewhere after the album's hooky hit songs "Breathe Into Me," "Let Go," and "Already Over," the mysterious "Lost," and the worshipful "Pieces," the album suffers a sameness that makes it a little hard listen to in its entirety. Today, we'll look at what went wrong on this album. 

1. "Intro" (End of Silence). In terms of albums with introductions, The End of Silence does well at establishing the mood of the album. It's not a skippable track. The unintelligible voices are probably studio conversations dubbed mysteriously, though Spotify has lyrics posted. A melancholy piano plays and strings are added to the short piece. The song leads into "Breathe Into Me."

3. "Let Go" ups the hard rock sound of the previous song. The soaring chorus leading into the abrasive second verse shows off the vocal prowess of lead singer Michael Barnes, who interestingly isn't credited as a writer for many of the songs on the record. 

4. "Already Over" feels like a pop song in the Evanescence vein. In some ways, the song sounds like wrestling with God, but the speaker feels the object of the song is "suffocating" him. The band, though, has talked about the song being about addiction and the chorus being a different "you," meaning giving the addiction over to God. The introduction with the strings and the piano are blended with distant-sounding screams of lead singer Michael Barns to remind us that we're not listening to garden-variety Top 40 when the driving beat takes us into the first verse. The chorus brings back the guitars, and the song no longer sounds like a ballad. 

5. "Lost" Red again takes down the momentum on this track. The lyrics seem to be a worship song but also seem to be about a struggle with identity. Completely "lost in you" seems like a positive thing in the context of the song, but there is a clear struggle. And how is this erasure of identity any different from the "suffocating" in "Already Over"? It's interesting to think about how I feel about this song now versus in 2006.

6. "Pieces" is the slowest song on the album other than "Already Over, Pt. 2." The song talks about the Christian theme of being broken before finding Christ, a common theme on this record.

7. "Break Me Down." The record picks back up with "Break Me Down." The elements of the first half are present in this song, but it feels bland.  In fact, 

8. "Wasting Time." Copy and paste the description from "Break Me Down." The back half of the album has a few different parts--acoustic guitars on "Break Me Down," beginning a song with a breakdown on "Wasting Time"--but it's mostly the same tempo, screaming, strings for effects, piano adding a haunting effect. It feels like a "Waste of Time" to talk about. 

9. "Gave It All Away." Ctrl + V. Interesting experiment: Put "Gave It All Away" after "Pieces" and see if the album feels slightly less dull. Maybe if I could have done this I would have listened to the album the whole way through in the car.

10. "Hide" adds a bit extra vulnerability in Michael Barnes' voice, mostly absent since "Let Go." The song turns into an instrumental called "Nocturne," which essentially ends the album. Was it a memorable album for anyone who doesn't have nostalgia for it? Even when it came out, I felt that Christian Rock was losing my attention as I started listening to other, non-nu-metal-influenced bands. Rob Graves created a nice composition and a cohesive album, but I think the failure is the lyrics. There's nothing specific about the struggle or addiction. The hits often give us the general idea, but a great album fills in specifics with its non-hit tracks. So tracks 7-10 feel like the same vague struggle with nothing new to say about it. 

11. "Already Over, Pt. 2" changes some of the lyrics and plays the song acoustically. It's an epilogue for the album that seems to feel like a kind of salvation.  My review of this album stands as just okay, a little monotonous, but bursting with potential. But rather than closing the matter, I'm interested in some of the themes of music production and lyrics, and the history of this band that I want to explore in either a reworking of this review, exploring another song in-depth from this album, or tracking the progression of the band on future albums. But for now, this review is over.