Review: Breaking Benjamin - Dear Agony

Okay, remember my review of Chevelle’s last album in which I railed against the state of modern radio rock?  To reiterate my stance, most of it’s pretty freaking bad.  A lot of the things that die-hard rock fans hate about straight-up pop - gratuitous over-production, emphasis on image over substance, and a general drought in any serious musical talent  or creativity - have leached into the rock scene to the extent that sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between the two.  But of course, there have been exceptions to this general rule, or at least instances of genuine originality and talent infiltrating the airwaves.  Over much of the past decade, Breaking Benjamin was another light in the darkness, a band that actually had something new and interesting to offer.  Their riffs were a little more angular, their melodies were a little more unpredictable, and vocalist Ben Burnley’s singing and lyrics had a little more personality than most of the band’s peers.  Sadly, their latest release, Dear Agony, falls way short of the standard set by their previous material, becoming one of the biggest disappointments of the past year or so.

The biggest problem I have with Dear Agony is how sterile it sounds.  The guitar tone in particular seems flat and utterly devoid of any inflection, personality, or really any indication that it was tracked by an actual human being rather than programmed in Pro Tools.  It’s like every bit of signal-compression and noise-reduction in the studio’s arsenal was thrown at the guitar tracks - maybe in an effort to make things sound more precise and less messy - and the end result is something that sounds so mechanical and computerized that it barely even sounds like a guitar anymore.  The vocal tracks are just as bad, utilizing a liberal amount of auto-tune and, moreover, simply recorded with a minimal amount of variation in delivery and tone.  This is especially disappointing since Burnley’s voice, with all its quirks and smirk-to-scream attitude, was always one of the band’s defining characteristics.  Here, his voice seems blander than it ever has.  Only a couple songs on the album (such as “Lights Out” and opener “Fade Away”) hint at the old Breaking Benjamin, with particularly heavy guitar riffs and a bit of Burnley’s old vocal personality peeking through.  Most of the album’s other tracks, though, are generic and uninspired to a really depressing extent - and the suffocating amount of studio sheen applied to everything only hurts matters more.  Really, what all this means for the whole package is that everything is processed and over-produced to the extent that it all sounds almost robotic, and as a result, the final product is boring, homogenized, and predictable - in other words, the farthest thing possible from the satisfying experience a rock album should be.  Maybe all this production work was an effort to compensate for a lack of inspired songwriting, but no matter how hard they try to dress it up, there’s no making up for the lack of quality material here.  Sure, there are guitars, drums, a bass track in there somewhere, and vaguely angry vocals, but without good songs to play, it’s still no fun to listen to.  It’s like ordering a New York strip and receiving a big slab of bologna.  Yeah, it’s technically still meat, but it’s nowhere near as good.

Rating: 1.5/5

Standout Tracks:
“Lights Out”
“Fade Away” 

Release Date: September 29, 2009