It`s getting late here so i haven`t got time to invest 1000 words
and two hours of my time to writing a blog, unlike what so many
people think i still have a job and i have to get out of bed really
early to do it. But i got enough time for a cup of tea and a choc
chip cookie, so i thought i would quickly put in a good word for
a song from well known and recently reformed US post-grunge
band Creed. Creed have always had an army of critics bagging
them despite reaching the stratosphere of commercial success
with the three albums they released in the late 90`s and early
2000`s, the first one, `My Own Prison`, despite being labelled
by many grunge purists as being Pearl Jam plagiarism, is truly
one of the best rock albums of the 90`s hands down. Lead vo-
calist Scott Stapp has a naturally similiar voice to that of Eddie
Vedder from Pearl Jam, but in Stapp`s defence, i have never
thought he is deliberately taking off Vedder. The fact is that
Stapp may have a deep and croaky voice like Vedder, but it
is better and more powerful by a mile, albeit very distinctive
and occasionally a little irratating. But his passion was always
there. I`ll leave a review of `My Own Prison` and the mega-
successful `Human Clay` for another time, but the third in-
stallment from the band `Weathered`, minus the original
bassist Brian Marshall and now as a studio 3-piece, has a
truly remarkable grunge-metal power ballad on it called
`One Last Breath`, which at the time could have been a
bit of a self observation by Stapp of the tension in Creed
which resulted in the band breaking up in 2004. Guitar-
ist Mark Tremonti had already layed down some killer
riffs on Creed`s first two albums, but now he had to fill
the bassist breach as well in the absence of the now de-
parted Brian Marshall. Scott Philips is the band`s stur-
dy drummer. Creed have always been seen to be a bit
of a born again christian band, certainly there is a lot of
religeous metaphors in Stapp`s lyrics, but as Tremonti
has always been only too keen to point out there is a big
diffrence between spirituality and religeon. Creed he be-
lieves is not a christian rock band, it`s a rock band which
has a lot of spiritual themes. Whatever Creed is, they are
a very successful band, they recently reformed and made
a new album called `Full Circle`, which i admit i haven`t
listened to yet, the years between 2004 and 2009 saw a
new band form from the ashes of Creed minus the singer
Scott Stapp, called Alter Bridge, which sound wise had a
lot of similarities to Creed, and a rather fruitless solo ca-
reer from the Creed-less Stapp. As i was getting to earl-
ier, the song `One Last Breath`, off the album `Weath-
ered`, is a masterpiece of post grunge rock which had a
totally way out there video clip to go with it. The lyrics
of the song paint a story of somebody who is suicidal &
feels that `six feet aint so far down`. The power vocal
chorus to the song, which is sung by Stapp with heart-
felt intensity, is unnerving but inspirational all in one.
And not forgetting team Tremonti/Philips who provi-
ded the metallic rhythm to the song, it really is one of
the best pieces of air guitar in the history of hard rock.
No comments:
Post a Comment